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By Devon VanHouten-Maldonado

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Copyright © 2020 Devon VanHouten-Maldonado

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All artworks and design by Devon VanHouten-Maldonado

First digital edition 2020, international

Published by the author

Chicago, IL

United States of America

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***** Table of contents:

(click to jump)

*Introduction

*Part one, Arco Iris

*Part two, Pinche Gringo

*Annex, Mole poblano

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Introduction
I never wanted to write a book, and it’s obvious already that Arco Iris is in many ways different from what you expect a book to be. I didn’t set out to be a writer either (a story that plays a central role in the plot of Arco Iris), but I have been lucky to work with international purveyors of journalism and art criticism, and, to date, my texts have been published in at least half a dozen languages. I owe an immense debt of inspiration to those artists, academics, creatives, curators, editors, gallerists, hippies and punks who made me write.

The events in Arco Iris are both real and fiction, two sides of the same coin. You decide where IRL stops and mystery begins. The voice and opinions of the narrator are not my own.

By publishing this way, I hope Arco Iris continues to be a living project, and the possibility exists that it will someday become solidified into something resembling a book or take on an entirely different form. For now though, while we’re all living with the spectre of a global pandemic, without considerable interest from literary agents, it is my pleasure to put this new novela out into the world as accessible and free for all on the Internet.

This is not a book, but I hope it may be considered literature of this time.

May, 2020

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Lieja 33 held an entire world within its graying walls and hulking front door. The apartments had been built quite handsomely, once a high-end hotel or condos for the Health Secretariat across the street, a block from the Bosque de Chapultepec, the city’s lung with innumerable shady corners for lovers to kiss and a castle built on Aztec ruins. Over time, though, the building’s grandeur had been wiped over with a dirty rag, and layers of paint piled up or peeled off. The checkered marble floors would never shine again and the stairs were rounded blunt by decades of heavy feet shuffling up and down. None of the original fixtures worked, so improvised wiring snaked along the hallways and ceilings under layers of paint or stretched through the heavy air. There were construction offices on the top floor of the crooked building that looked upon the sacred hill from Huitzilopochtli’s vision. Men and women wearing safety vests and hardhats came and went all day throwing trash in the doorway of my apartment, while migrant day laborers with tattooed tears and prying eyes formed a line leading up the stairwell. The maniacal bowlegged caretaker, Mack, bent under the weight of a lifetime of work, lorded over the building’s water supply. His knuckles were swollen with arthritis and his brain had been made crazy by decades of drowning in alcohol. He feebly fended off the dust from outside with an old mop and grumbled incomprehensibly when I asked why my apartment didn’t have water. For days at a time the pipes would only gurgle when I spun the faucet.

“No hay,” said Mack. But we all knew Mack’s power over the toilets and showers was getting to his head, because he was always turning the pump on and off, filling up the tank that dominated the courtyard upon which the apartment window gazed part way, then shutting the valve again so that tenants barely had time to fill up a few buckets for a sponge bath. The longer the water was out the more pestilent the building became as sewage sat in the toilets and pipes for days. The shower drain became a portal to a fecal hell of stench that clung to the humid air. Thick sewage smells slithered up through the pipes like spirits risen from the earth to seek revenge on Cortez. The building was sinking into the underworld toward eternal damnation with the ghosts of Aztecs and conquistadors, sagging into the earth at an angle clearly visible to the naked eye. For an added twist of irony, summertime monsoons would flood the ground floor of Lieja 33 but the apartments still didn’t have water to flush.

Next door to my one bedroom apartment in the crumbling art-deco building the neighbor was a prostitute from Buenos Aires. I’d gone beyond my own imagination into the bowels of steamy bohemia when I rented the room in the Juarez bario with all cash, 6,000 pesos for rent and another 6,000 deposit. In my naivety I didn’t think she was a whore even as callers whistled below her window oozing steamy red light onto the street, or even when the buzzer woke me before dawn almost every night. Sweaty men in cheap suits sheepishly shimmied into the apartment or waited in the landing amid the graffiti and occasional puddles of urine. I’d never met a sex worker before, but she was sweet. She shared her Wifi with me. Wrapped in a silk bathrobe and red incense smoke that seeped from under the door and into the landing, her face bore the marks of hidden age held up by injections of botox. She was ageless. A Butterfly of the night. Tapes of meditation chants and marijuana smoke saw her sailing down to the salon below our apartments where she spent the afternoons preening. At night, seeing her leave the building from a block away as our lives intersected where my day ended and hers began, she was beautiful.

When the Internet was out, which happened every time Anna forgot to pay the bill or couldn’t because work had been slow, or whenever it rained, I knocked on her door and she waved me into her barely furnished flat to reset the modem. You could tell the apartment maintained the original two-bedroom floor plan and it still had an old checkered marble floor. It was probably once an almost beautiful space, fitting for her, with warm afternoon light, but the curtains were drawn and a sweet haze enveloped me as she closed the door. She must have made good money, to rent the big apartment and work from home turning tricks, while tens of thousands of her coworkers leaned against brick walls in abandoned shop windows waiting for a ride to an hourly hotel. A cast of mystic figures, black candles bathing in their own wax, and a stack of tarot cards were strewn over the dining table. Seeing me notice them, Anna offered to read my cards and asked if I wanted to rent her extra room. She said she could get me a job as a dancer at a gay club. I imagined myself gyrating in a banana hammock stuffed with dirty blue 20-peso bills and laughed, but tucked the offer away in the back of my mind for later incase I ran out of money. I didn’t realize until she gave me her phone number — to be neighborly, I thought — and noticed that her profile picture was explicitly pornographic and her status read,

“solo por dinero 😘.”

Despite the shortcoming of the sewage, I was barely making enough to afford the rent at Lieja 33 working at a local Mexico City newspaper. The News was the only daily in Mexico published in English for all the monolingual gringos and European tourists who spoke English as a third or fourth language. I didn’t give a shit about journalism or writing. I wanted to be a famous painter. But I knew my work wasn’t any good, so I needed a job, and the newspaper was hiring with the promise of a visa and 500 American dollars a month. So I became a reporter, without experience or attachment to reporting the truth. The world is full of mortals trying to kill a free man’s vibe, so someone tipped someone off to who I was and what I did — being any kind of journalist worth the title in Mexico is about as good an idea as being a journalist in a war zone. So you can imagine my fear of being thrown into an unmarked van and driven off into the night when, after drinking and snorting generic modafinil with coworkers, I came home to find the door ajar and all my valuables stolen. There was no sign of forced entry, someone had expertly picked the lock, and nothing was thrown around or broken. My laptop, camera and hard-drive were all gone, along with a cheap watch and silver chain. But everything was eerily still and orderly for a robbery in broad daylight with hundreds of people around. My fear peaked when I saw that my passport had been left open on the dining table as a personal message. Watch your ass. When I met them in the dusty street below, the responding officers could hardly be persuaded to dismount from their vehicle, let alone bothered to file a police report.

“We can’t help you, Güero,” said the ranking officer without jotting down a single word or snapping a photo.

Of course, neither the haggard caretaker, nor the prostitute neighbor, nor the restaurateurs below or the builders upstairs saw or heard anything. They gossiped constantly, pressing their ears to the doors and walls fishing for something juicy, but their curiosity must have left the building along with all my stuff. It was them.

*****
They were watching me, and while the robbery may have been a warning, I knew what would come next if I stuck around. So before the sun rose, after a few futile hours at the police station in which I tried in vain to report the robbery, I made my way back to Leja 33 to pack a bag and made off on the metro toward el TAPO, the biggest bus station in the city with departures for destinations all over Mexico every 15 minutes. I bought a one way ticket to a touristy beach town a bus ride long enough for a nap from the chaos of the capital. Disappointed by the lack of open sand and annoyed by sloppy sunburned gringas, I found a spot at a red plastic table in front of a resort. My disapproval grew as I saw the menu was in English with prices in American dollars. One drink, I said to myself outloud.

“Just one drink.”

In my perturbed state, I bummed a smoke from a leathery middle-aged Canadian who struck up a conversation as the only other paranoid loner around. I had the erie feeling that he wasn’t just visiting either. The red Canadian was agitated, coked out, and he spoke in big gestures about his business in finance, and about how he ended up in Guadalajara hiding from outstanding sums demanded from him by the IRS. He said he did a million dollars of blow in one year.

"This beach is controlled by narcos," said the suspicious Canadian swiveling his bald red head around in paranoia.

"All these beaches are, man, don’t even think otherwise for a second, or you’ll get popped."

I suspected his involvement with the law went beyond simple tax troubles but he insisted he was a "moneyman." He said his daughter was a famous lingerie model, which I found to be an awkward subject, but the alcohol made it less creepy and mildly titillating to be this man's friend. The Narco-Canadian tax dodger insisted on buying me a shot of tequila and beer, a shot of tequila and a beer, tequila, beer, etc.,while he polished off a whole bottle of Bacardi Blanco in short order. Stumbling drunk with the sun still high, the Canadian invited me to eat at a nearby restaurant, which we walked to as best we could, stopping along the way at a parked BMW, where there was another bottle of Bacardi stashed. More Bacardi with a splash of coke for the gentleman, more tequila and beer for me, and a basket of soggy onion-rings between us before I blacked out. Refusing my attempts to take the bus back to my shoddy little motel, the shirtless Canadian, two bottles of Bacardi deep, insisted that he drive me back to the beach on his way up the coast. In the BMW, flying down the highway swerving in and out of traffic, I fought to stay conscious, only halfway succeeding, but continuously jerked back to reality by the pilot's erratic driving and death's tap on my shoulder. What felt like an eternity later, we pulled into the gas station at the entrance to the town and I stumbled out of the car, ignoring the Canadian’s appeals to stay put and he would drive me to my door. I vomited on my shoes and made my way through the town, down the same dusty main street and to the house where I curled up in a ball and gave thanks that my life had been spared from being splattered on the highway by a Canadian Narco psychopath.

*****
A sunbeam in one bloodshot eye found me asleep in my shoes and drenched in sweat, then rising with a grimace and tripping down the stairs to find blinding light pouring in through the open front door. The dust and smoke lingered in the sun like the ghosts brought to life by powders sweated out on the dance floor or a stranger’s swampy bed. The brownish carpet was pockmarked with burns, red stains and stamped out cigarettes. There must have been hundreds of crumpled up cans and bottles cast aside in the stupor of inebriation with lost jackets, keys, and half smoked packs of Delicados. Despite the potential energy of a party hanging in the air with the powdery smoke, I was most certainly alone. With shaky hands I put the kettle on the fire to boil water for coffee and sank into the grey sofa, clearing away some bottles and cans to roll a spliff. Inhaling the spicy smoke deeply, I tried to piece the night together, massaging my sore jaw. Considering the possibilities of stumbling around Mexico City in the middle of the night chewing my cheeks, I was lucky to wake up. My hand impulsively reached to my right pocket feeling for my money clip and then to the left for my phone, both still in their respective places — a miracle, magic. My fingers stumbled to my back pocket and pulled out a small plastic baggy of a mysterious off-white powder with ominous looking chunks. A hazy memory came to me, of frenzied text messages and cash exchanges in the dark kitchen of an apartment. Boom, boom, boom. I walked two blocks up the wide dusty avenue to eat some greasy tacos al pastor, leaving footprints in the ash and groaning nauseously as the orange meat hit my stomach and bubbled into gassy alchemy. The tacos make me feel a little more alive and I shuffled home sighing obnoxiously. A few minutes later, teetering above the toilet bowl with dick in hand — my pee smells a little strange — I saw flecks of vomit splattering the floor, triggering my gag reflex and sending sour bile into the back of my throat. Sitting there amid the forest of red cups and smoke, I started to think about Arco Iris — I would always get upset when she snorted cocaine or ate MDMA. After the memory past, I felt sure that the world would be over soon. My self-disgust weighed on me even heavier than the hangover or the residual high that had me grinding my teeth. It was almost Christmas. There was ash falling quietly outside and covering the city like a blanket of hellish snow. Has Popocatépetl woken up to see the show?

*****
Falling in love at the end of the world is like getting tossed a life vest after being pushed into a boiling pit of lava. It's like waking up during bypass surgery and looking into your chest cavity to see someone else's hands closing around your heart. It's like getting water-boarded by a grizzly CIA interrogator in some far away black-site for hours on end, then being kissed on the lips by a wet-mouthed nurse. How could I resolve the dissonant ecstasy of sighing into Arco Iris's eyes during eternal humid nights hanging on each second that bloomed from her lips like centuries, while soldiers were called up to action and refugees washed onto hostile beaches? It's crazy, when you're in love all rationale is burned to bits by hot embers in the eyes of your lover, which you breathe on masochistically. What sweet suffering to fall in Love at the end of the world.

But any serious work of art starts with a broken heart, so here we are, somewhere at the beginning of this adventure that you and I are embarking on together, it’s Christmas and I’m trying to fill the hole in my chest with smokey poems and poison.

”You're so American," she said.

Then there was only the cool radiation from my laptop to keep me warm on Christmas Eve, while the first pieces of ash began to fall like snow and she danced at clubs and blasé dinner parties at beautiful designer houses in colonial neighborhoods where the ghosts of revolution were whispered by Pancho Villa; checking my phone every 30 seconds like it was a nuke that would explode unless a message popped up from Arco Iris before the impending apocalypse. I kept staring into the screen as if it was a portal to where she lay her head or twirled in circles to the drum and bass in someone else’s loft. Last seen at 4:27am… I tortured myself, endlessly re-reading text messages and staring at her profile picture. Remembering her eyelashes batting against mine as we lay nakedly tangled in a pool of sticky love smells until the sun came up. Even after her face was raw from rubbing against my stubbly beard, we kept kissing and kissing and kissing. But it was, though we didn’t talk about it yet, the end of the world. The smell of burning plastic and smoke filled up my drafty little apartment at Lieja 33 while tiny black strings of ash start falling like snowflakes from hell.

*****
I climbed aboard a pesero at the airport, and the rig cast toward north, spewing black smoke and rattling around corners at breakneck speed as the engine threatened to explode. The overworked motor filled the cab with repressive heat and nauseating exhaust fumes. But I was happy to hide my green light behind sunglasses and to mimic the steely look on the other passengers' faces, while suppressing a stupid grin, drunk on freedom and high on gas. Upon arriving to the beach and hopping down from the bus, I felt the first stomach-wrenching twang of fear. I hadn't seen the house since I was a child and had only the written instructions of my aunt to guide me — walk down the main road toward the beach then turn left at the church. The sun made the feeling of not belonging and the weight of my luggage with everything I owned inside, plus the weight of curious local gazes, even heavier. I doubled back to the same block again and again, doing circles in a half panic. After considerable effort and discomfort I finally recognized the beach house from my childhood.

Despite the idyllic setting, despair set in within two weeks. Not the kind of acute despair that keeps you up at night or kills your appetite, no, but that dull ethereal wondering despair that slowly sucks the oxygen out of the space around you until you remember to breathe and inhale sharply so as not to forget that you're real flesh and blood. That baseline suffering that comes with the territory of living as a sentient being, best illustrated by crushing loneliness on a mountain or beach, where you're confronted by the fucked up nature of your mind. I was a painter and, like all young painters, I was too caught up in ego and crippling self doubt to make any paintings worth a second look. An inability to feel nostalgia lead me into situations like these, chasing an exotic tropical dream like a lone conquistador — butchering languages and stumbling through potential identities ungracefully.

During Holy Week the beach filled up with big, happy brown families drinking beers by carton and crunching chips doused in hot sauce between their teeth. Weathered women wrapped in colorful woven shawls sold skewered shrimp, ceviche, mangos and tostadas made from pig's feet. A mariachi band in a 12-foot fishing boat bobbed up and down amid the waves serenading those fancy families with a few pesos to spare. The swatch of sand that was once all mine was prime real estate now. After not hearing any English for over a month, the town was full of the shrewd and careless US English that tortures eardrums the world over.

“Oh look, John, they have hamburgers! DE NADA!”

The following weekend locals celebrated their earnings from the influx of inlanders and urbanites during Holy Week with a big town-wide festival. Walking back from the fair erected in the main town square, after some fried food and a few micheladas, I came face to face with one of the locals I’d come to know as the fisherman's son, Ivan, amid the smoke of fireworks and squeals of rickety fair rides.

"Join our party, dude," Ivan said in Spanish, gesturing toward a cooler brimming with bottles of Corona.

In the same moment a banda burst into song and the locals swept me up into a dusty dance circle in the middle of the main road cutting through the tiny town. They laughed at my terrible dancing and broken Spanish, but the women swung me around and Ivan replaced the beer in my hand with a new one before I could finish the first. Wah-waah, wah-waah, drummed the tuba while the trumpets twiddled arpeggios of pure ecstasy and everyone except me sang along with the sonnets about womanizing, gun toting and selling drugs. Suddenly a horse and rider appeared among the crowd as if by magic and, to to my bewilderment — I was actually frightened — the animal began to trot along with the rhythm of the band, dancing with all of its bulk and beauty. Small drops of blood appeared on the horse's haunches from where the caballero dug into the animal's hide with his spurs to the rhythm of the band. Before I knew what was happening, I was ushered away hurriedly and drunkenly, with the threat of having my wallet stolen by the same group I’d been swept up by. A few days later I painted a portrait of Ivan and his young son, which I gladly traded for some fresh filets of ahi and red snapper caught that morning. I couldn’t tell if Ivan liked the little painting, lovingly rendered on a piece of thick cold-pressed cotton paper, or whether he was just being kind about the expressionist, less-than-photographic way in which I represented their big toothy grins and straw hats in bright ochres, blues and reds.

But ash is the most annoying powder. Even the sands of the most perfect beach become a billion sharp nuisances after a lonely few weeks of only waking up once it’s too hot to sleep; drinking Nescafe powdered coffee; half-heartedly jogging toward the tide pools at the southern end of this particularly pleasing stretch of Pacific coastline; swimming without grace in the waves for a few minutes, and then unceremoniously bathing under the pressure of doing something worthwhile and knowing you probably won't, not today. I walked down the beach to a restaurant (two plastic tables and a gas stove under a palm tree) where a guy who called himself Paparazzi sold me a big handful of seedy outdoor weed and a fillet of fish for a few bucks USD. Paparazzi showed me pictures of celebrities on vacation in Mexico — stock white famous people like Brad and Angelina, except for one of Juan Gabriel — while a cast of shady henchmen sized me up, trying to feel out how flush I was and where I was staying.

"Up the beach," I told them and left without tipping.

Another unbelievable sunset and repeat.

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*****


Around Thanksgiving, before things in the city were too bad, the end not yet upon us, The News no longer accepting my exile, I had no choice but to clamber again on a bus toward the capital. The bus was a pesero with no catalytic converter, a big V10 that sounded like an American muscle car and a loud sound system banging reggaeton. Mexico City is surrounded by a ring of high volcanoes. Some of the tallest mountains in North america loom over the city like ancestral guardians of the great civilization. All these peaks compose the great transvolcanic belt, the Sierra Nevada — Iztaccíhuatl, Popocatépetl, Chichinauhtzin, Tláloc, Ajusco, and other guardians loomed dangerously above the valley. As their once great glaciers were boiled into steam by the flows of lava oozing from vents and craters near the majestic peaks, curtains of steam hid the city from view except for a perceived glow around the edges, a green radioactive glisten like aurora borealis in the north. The driver careened around hairpin corners sliding to the wrong side of the road and then gassing it into the next turn. The whole rig caused a tremendously wonderful and dissonant racket, like some redneck monster truck rally in the middle of a tulip farm in Holland. I gripped the plastic seat for my life and shot sideways glances and nervous grins at two Germans who had boarded at the same time. Wherever you go in the whole world there are always Germans. As we flew down the mountain, the bus kept making stops in the middle of the forest to pick up passengers, hands up for a pickup in the middle of nowhere, everyone heading down to valley into the center of colonial civilization. The bus filled up with a troupe of tiny but robust middle-aged men and women with bags, baskets and buckets full of herbs, mushrooms and berries. They wore hand-embroidered checker patterns and clean white cotton. The air was full of magic as more and more of the gang emerged from the forest and boarded the bus with their bags of sweet and earthy smells. A stranger in a bar told me there are witches that live on the slopes of Popocatepetl. I wondered if they were being driven into the city by the flows of lava and walls of steam.

“At night you can see fireballs shooting across the mountain,” he said.

The witches turned into fireballs at night to teleport across time and space. At first I was afraid. The magical presence of these forest wanderers and gatherers was so strong that I doubted myself on the brink of two dimensions. But then the troop was all yellow grins and happy laughter. Every smile with missing teeth who clambered aboard our express bus embraced every other with jokes in a language I’d never heard. As the road threw their bodies back and forth, they laughed and the bus was awash with pungent aromas that hugged and soothed my protesting muscles. The smells from outside mixed with the smells from inside as the bus zipped past small villages and improvised cinder block shacks. Every square millimeter of land was occupied by tall stalks of green, purple and blue corn. As we passed one village, a drunk in a black cowboy hat climbed aboard the bus but refused to pay the driver, whom he seemed to know personally. Again, I felt nervous about the confrontation but the drunk said something about the driver’s wife, and the wrinkled hands and faces laughed collectively, chattering in a hybrid tongue with a few words in Spanish that I could fish out amid the waterfall of soliloquies. In the middle of that landscape of corn and volcanoes, amid yellow teeth and cracked hands, the city rose up like a glowing virus. The magical group was gone all at once, already cooking their spoils into potions, medicine and food by the time I noticed their dissipation.

*****
From beneath the clouds, Mexico City rose up in a mandala of lights and buildings, a fractal of human history. She roared faintly outside the bus window with a subtle bass tone and tremble. The beach seemed impossibly far away now but I imagined the drone of traffic to be the work of the same metaphysical cosmic force that throws the ocean onto the shore. The nose hair-burning stench of sulfur dioxide penetrated through the windows of the bus as we were engulfed by the sea of city. The smell of chile and evaporated blood. I felt like Cortes riding into the valley for the first time on a steel stallion to behold the white city of Tenochtitlan, flanked by volcanoes and protected on all sides by water.

My first night in the city I slept on the tile floor on top of some cotton mats printed with colorful floral patterns on the floor of Lieja 33, shivering with cold from the air blowing in from the nearby Bosque de Chapultepec, covered in a few hoodies and jackets. Fear and loneliness overwhelmed me during the first cold nights inside the apartment where the smell of thieves and police still hung in the air. The pink fingerprint detecting powder of the perritos, the unenthusiastic crime scene investigation team, still clung to the light switches and door handle. The next day I bought a plastic table and chairs, sheets and a towel from the giant supermarket down the street. I visited the Mercado de Sonora, Mercado Lagunilla, La Merced, La Catedral Metropolitana (built from the ruins of the same Tenochtitlan that Cortes set upon a half dozen centuries earlier) and I ate tacos in the street. The tacos guys made fun of my stumbling Spanish and served me eyeballs and brain. The woman in the homeopathic store laughed in bewilderment when I asked for jamon de menta (peppermint ham) instead of jabon de menta (peppermint soap).

*****
Wearing a rumpled dress shirt and tie, sweating in the midday heat, I made my way to The News offices in a fancy area of the city called Lomas de Chapultepec, across the street from the Mexican UN offices. She towered like a bent-necked vulture near the altitudes of my own six feet and it looked like she had gone under the needle a few times for rounds of aestheticizing the lips and cheeks. She set me to translating a sample text — probably something blindly praising some slimy governor for a new infrastructure project, some highway overpassing a poor neighborhood, etc. (the short articles were unreadable and didn’t even aspire to simple beauty or goodness) — and she started yelling at her computer as if it had a digital vendetta against her.

“Don’t show up with tattoos or nose rings,” she sprayed. I could see her spiddle on the table as she spoke.

”You don't seem too terrible but did you go to public school?"

All of her emails were written exclusively in the subject line in all caps: "PLEASE LEARN CORRECT SPELLING… WE WENT OVER THIS IN A MEETING… THEY ARE ADVERTISERS."

It appeared I’d uprooted my life, imagining a steamy bohemian paradise, just to work in an office surrounded by gringos whining endlessly about precious food allergies while the rain flooded the streets and cars crept along the massive boulevards amidst the sludge. Like revenge by Tlaloc the Mexican rain god, sewage actually sprang up from the manholes as the city drowned from above and below. The News staff hunched over their keyboards within yellowing cubicles in the cave-like office, which turned into a sweaty oven when the afternoon sun hit. Their bodies sank into the cushy office chairs like fat fungi with greasy fingers, powered by Coca-cola, Doritos and embarrassing fantasy porn. The paper was a thinly veiled voice box for the conservative government, which kept a muzzle on the media by lining the pockets of editors like Therese at sorry excuses for newspapers like The News. We were a sad portrait of journalism but not an incorrect one. Myself and the others who actually put the paper out every day were brought together by a total disdain for Therese. She would storm into the office every few days with the most ungraceful cacophony of Jimmy Choo high heels on tile floors and waste an hour of our time on a tirade about ethics in journalism or something equally as ironic. One day the managing editor accidentally misspelled the president’s name on the front page. Those were the kind of things that would happen at The News offices from Sunday through Thursday night. The paper was published and delivered 50,000 copies Monday through Friday. The states that paid more bribe money got more ink and the papers stacked up with unreadable 200-word tidbits about entirely un-newsworthy happenings around the Mexican republic.

As I lazily pecked at my keyboard grunting through another translation about a new program in Quintana Roo or Chiapas, I felt the skulking form of Therese behind me as she zeroed in on her target.

“You’re going to be a reporter now,” she said.

“Go to this press conference tomorrow and write up 700 words... And take pictures! I want clean Copy!”

So I found myself promoted to a position I was totally unqualified for but glad for the opportunity to get out of the stifling office, even though it meant going to a snobby event and attempting to find 700 words to write about the unspeakably shallow art. That was the first time I got published, totally by chance and necessity. Not the kind of romantic, I always wanted to be a writer, story you were expecting. I was an office zombie, a godinez, shuffling into and out of The News offices after mind-numbing shifts of 11 or 12 hours only to pack into a steamy bus that crawled excruciatingly slowly down Reforma Boulevard in tropical storms that brought the city to a halt. The bus slid out on the wet road and flew 25 meters over the greasy pavement, slamming into a passenger van and causing a multiple car pileup in the middle of the rain, and I didn’t even look up as the passengers shuffled off the bus, taking back my five pesos from the driver on the way out the door.

*****


Eventually you will be nothing.

Eventually death and emptiness will open you with room to grow

becoming, budding, blooming.

Eventually you will be nothing.

Born again to discover a new sun peering out from an original

perspective

on the spiral arm somewhere flying through the Milky Way.

Eventually you will be ________.

*****
Arco Iris’s father was an alcoholic chemist with an illustrious career in Mexico City’s underground fireworks market (everything worthwhile happened in the black market where unbridled, unregulated ingenuity could flourish to appeal carnal desire). By the time he quit drinking the poison had gone to his mind and he could be heard coughing in his bedroom, and peeing into plastic water bottles that Arco Iris or her tiny mom had to empty later. During the day he was the master of his domain in the San Pablito fireworks market on the outskirts of the city. He was famous for his work and all the other vendors called him Maestro Fuego. Around the holidays, the same time that the end finally started to descend, he was at his busiest, frantically trying to keep up with the demand for his fantastic pyrotechnics. Without being held back by bureaucracy or the limitations of safety, the old man set about making the most exciting and colorful whirs and bangs his trial-by-fire education allowed. He bought all of his supplies on the Internet black market (with some help from Arco Iris and her sisters) so he enjoyed unlimited access to rare gunpowders and colorants from China, India and the United States. Sitting at his little workbench, with a cigarette clenched between his yellow teeth and wearing a monocle over one lens of his duct-taped glasses, he set about combining powders, grinding up minerals and elements, and twisting colorful paper into arrangements that cascaded toward a short wick, which when lit set off a chain reaction that exploded toward the heavens then burst into smoke rings and cascades of red, green and blue sparks. Maestro Fuego could make an explosion in the shape of a marriage proposal or a curse. His most popular firework exploded into an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe and then rained prayers down to earth on little bits of colorful paper. The official report said the accident was caused by two teenagers’ careless joint, but it was actually Maestro who sparked the blaze when he threw his burning cigarette into a trash heap with discarded chemicals without thinking after getting the sperm sucked from his balls by one of the old market whores who he’d known since he was 13 years old and suspected that at least one of her kids was his. Arco Iris’s father died there, happy among his work, a few days before Christmas, in a spectacular explosion fit for the best fireworks maker in all of the Valley of Mexico. His secrets were blown to bits with him because he never bothered to take an apprentice, while lances of sparks and smoke rings shot from the burning market as it was incinerated in a chain reaction, and the column of rainbow smoke was full of prayers on little pieces of paper.

*****
They lived in one of the most densely populated barrios in the city, notorious for drug trafficking and kidnapping. I liked it. Arco Iris took me to the witch doctor down the block, where the bent old woman locked us into a small brick oven temazcal where a single gas burner boiled a huge pot of water full of herbs. The room heated up with steam and the rich scent of the herbs as we sweated away our demons on the edge of hallucination, wanting to hold each other but unwilling to be subjected to the heat of another body. Once Arco Iris and I spent enough time together to always be on each others’ nerves, entering that perpetual stage of agitation after the intoxicating hit of infatuation wears off, we went to the Mercado Sonora, the magic market, where curanderos like the old woman in her neighborhood performed all sorts of rituals, for good and evil. I wanted to get a limpia, cleaned, because Arco Iris, along with the wretched newspaper and Therese, had me so stressed out I just wanted to drown in a swimming pool of mezcal. The shaman wore all white with a hat that looked like an old surgeon's uniform and beckoned for me to follow him up a metal ladder to a small room above his market stall. Kneeling in front of a shrine adorned with the Virgin of Guadalupe, la Santa Muerte and other saints I didn’t recognize along with talismans from Africa, Cuba and South America, he instructed me to pray for all of the things I’d done wrong and that were troubling me. The shaman took a big swig of aguardiente and spit it in my face, beating me with a bouquet of herbs and plants, leaving my exposed skin red and irritated. Using the potent alcohol, the witch doctor lit a ring of fire around my feet and burned coyote hair and copal, the smoke carrying away curses and providing protection, the shaman said. He rubbed an egg up and down my body, muttering prayers and incantations, spitting various substances into my face and jerking my body around forcefully, as if squeezing the evil out through my appendages.

Arco Iris also showed me the underbelly of the city aboard the metro system. Metro stations in Mexico City, like Tacubaya, are their own little sub-capitals complete with restaurants, markets and movie theaters. The city branches out from metro stations like nucleases with a nucleus. Busses, markets and neighborhoods revolve around the metro, which gave my bed a little shake passing underneath Lieja 33 as I was propped up on some pillows with a drink on the nightstand typing away articles for The News late into the night. In all of the chaos of the metro, getting handled by an abuelita with places to be and the cacophony of vendors advertising their wares in chanting song, it's easy to overlook the tremendous engineering feat that the metro must have been, as you descend hundreds of feet below the earth passing pizza places and doctors offices, and various lines of the subterranean tunnel system crisscross over each other. It's all the city government can do just to keep the enormous machine running, shuttling literally millions of people around the city every day. Every day the metro is over capacity and every day someone jumps in front of an arriving train and splats themselves on the tracks, causing an enormous inconvenience for a few thousand riders until all the blood can be mopped up and the guts untangled from the wheels.

Riding the metro is a rite of passage in Mexico City. People mostly stare down at their feet grumpily or try not to make eye contact but sometimes the chaos is so total that people can’t help but smile at the ridiculousness of reality in the bowels of the beast. During rush hour everyone, from the taco lady to the businessman, fight so hard to get through the doors before they shut that, after all of the shoving and pulling, there’s an unacknowledged mutual congratulations and brief eye contact between the the Chilangos just trying to get home to their families. Whenever anyone falls down, they’re helped to their feet by dozens of hands who then go on their way without ado or thanks.

Everyone going places together, in mutual sweaty and stinky discomfort, shoved inside someone’s armpit or squished next to a young couple who kiss and tie tongues so passionately that their spiddle threatens to splash anyone within a meter proximity. Smack-Sluuuuuurp-smack. Amid all the immaculate chaos, people make an honest living selling pretty much anything you can imagine in the Mexico City metro, from bubblegum to screwdrivers, from arnica balm to anarchist literature. The price is always 10 pesos.

“Diez pesos le vale, diez pesos le cuesta!” they sing out, working their way up and down the train.

Harikrishna followers glide into and out of the cars also singing, “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare,” and handing out pamphlets.

A blind keyboardist singing 80s classic rock, jams up and down the isles of snoozing workers and kissing couples. Two young men sniffing glue out of a rag work their way between cars with a sack of broken glass which they flop and flip onto acrobatically, swinging perilously from the handrails and seats, nearly catching bystanders in the face with flying feet. Their backs are full of long keloid scars and still bleeding gashes which the young men don’t seem to feel as they splash again and again onto the broken glass and the dirty metro floor.

Arco Iris and I were leaving the metro in Coyoacan looking for a dance school, where she said she was looking for an old teacher (she confessed that they had slept together). And while we traversed the station the rain picked up to a roar creating a cascade of water down the steps to the metro entrance. Umbrellaless, we stayed within the shelter of the metro taking refuge in the long tunnel between train lines where it was dry and the floor was clean enough to sit. A little put out and bored, we sat there for a minute until a silence fell between us and, through the humidity, the quiet notes of a guitar came to our ears in arpeggios and scales of a classical master. After Arco Iris and I noticed the music, suddenly the whole passageway was full of reverberations and overtones bouncing around the tile and marble floors. Sitting on the floor at the other end of the long hallway, a boy of no more than 17 worked his fingers up and down the fretboard of a withered instrument. As if in a trance, the boy didn’t notice when we approached, he didn’t notice the rain but it was as if his playing had excited the heavens to unleash their own symphony and the total ambience of nature and man vibrated through our bodies with all the power of an impossible moment. A group of boys across the damp passageway from Arco Iris and I opened up a backpack to accidentally reveal a big, silver 45. pistol that nearly clattered to the floor before they stole away down another passage.

*****
Working as a reporter at The News in every way, even through the nefarious intervention of Therese, brought me to a point of surrealism beyond my imagination, like Cortez the first time he gazed down in astonishment at Tenochtitlan in the valley. At first he couldn’t believe his eyes. The towering white pyramids and plumbing wouldn’t be rivaled by any 16th century architecture in Europe, where the streets were full of human shit and syphilis pus. In the morning I would take the metro to a new secretariat building or a museum for a press conference in a far away neighborhood. They were always the same: everyone would express their exuberant gratitude to the government and talk about how the event was groundbreaking for Mexico, while I tried to eat as many pastries as possible and suck down enough coffee to battle back the hangover from the night before. On good days I typed up articles about art shows or a cultural phenomenon worth reading, and on bad days I was an unglorified advertising writer for the nutcracker ballet or a new medical scam whose CEO happened to be buddies with The News’ higher ups. Somewhere along the line, the editor, Therese, assigned me the tremendous honor of going to see the president give his yearly address from the presidential palace, which happens to look out over the Zocalo square and the ruins of the main pyramid of Tenochtitlan and the enormous Catholic cathedral built with rocks and cement from ground bone and blood of the Mexica civilization. Time is always collapsing on itself here. So I suffered through the hour long speech by the guero president, which included a steaming pile of propaganda about the progress the government made that year, not unlike the State of the Union by the president of the United States but arguably even less loosely based on fact. Though no one cared much about the truth, and politics were mostly ignored in Mexico except as part of a charade, like a married couple who sleep in separate bedrooms but stay together for appearances and because they’re attached to resenting each other. The president was much smaller in person than he seemed on TV, barely coming to the shoulders of his military escort, and he made promises about economic growth everyone knew were bullshit and infrastructure projects that were supposed to take five years but were never finished. He claimed that violent crime was falling, but it was rising. He said that energy reform would unlock new oil fields and coal seams, but the capital city was already experiencing long power outages and water shortages while the temperature dropped as smoke and steam began to obscure the sun slow enough that no one noticed. Back in the dingy office, I started writing the front page story of the president's big speech with a reasonable but not disparaging criticism of the facts versus what he said, barely visible behind the podium wearing the wide sash of the president in the colors of the Mexican flag, a hallmark of Latin American dictators.

“Are you crazy?!” yelled Therese.

“We can’t publish this!”

My article was censored to oblivion, so what came out was a gushy piece of trash news about the new airport which probably still won’t be done by the time you’re reading this. It was a sad but good lesson in journalism and the world order that keeps mortals sedated and poor. Therese caught on to my dissent through the press and punished me with long office hours and generally made my life hell.

After a few paychecks from The News I moved into a little painting studio in the Centro Historico, not far from where the president gave his speech and the original Aztec capital where every meter of soil beneath the cobblestone streets holds secrets to a forgotten past. During the daytime the streets of Centro are a sea of people all the way to the horizon, amid dozens of colonial palaces that have been appropriated for malls, coffee shops and restaurants or turned into museums. I wondered if Montezuma could have imagined his empire bursting with so much life. What would Nezahualcoyotl think of the stench and the suffering? As Michel de Montaigne wrote about the cannibals of Brazil, not long after Cortez rode on the Valley of Mexico, trying to imagine Europe from their primitive perspective, “I think it is more barbaric to eat a man alive than to eat him dead.” In Mexico City all four horsemen of the apocalypse get drunk together and snort cocaine in the Centro’s numerous vintage cantinas, forgetting about their work in the depths of sex and powder and ash.

*****
The little painting studio I rented was just a few square meters but with tall ceilings, making a perfect cube with french windows in the old colonial style that open outwards onto the street. The building was 150 years old, and originally built, I was told by the landlord, as a boarding school then converted to a brothel around the time of the Mexican Revolution, with several dozen rooms distributed across three floors opening to a large central courtyard. A steep curving staircase wound up from the ground floor to the third story where I worked into the night to little artistic avail, drowning in paint fumes and self doubt, feeling paranoid and alone but happy about my crazy freedom. In the afternoon, riding a creaky single-speed bicycle from my apartment at Lieja 33, the blazing sun pursued me like a ghost though the heavy wooden door and into the building. Ascending the curving staircase through cooler but no less stinky air, as the curtain of heat lifted from my peeling shoulders, I left behind the cacophony of the street for the heavy sanctitude of the workspace, where I blasted hip hop and reggaeton and strolled around shirtless like a flamboyant frat boy artist. It was also where I went not to work, avoiding Therese and the newspaper. The other rooms were occupied by electricians and repairmen, each with their speciality — TVs, stereos, musical instruments, etc. They were all honest laborers with rough hands, making a meager living like everyone used to before computers turned us into soft-handed, gluten-free butterballs.

“Biblical fatigue of earning our bread, inconsiderate fear of poverty,” wrote Julio Cortazar about the whores and rough-handed Mexicans who labored here. “Necessity binds the world.”

The lights would cut off when one of the electricians blew a fuse or zapped himself, leaving the smell of burning hair in the hallways. The bathrooms were always out of service and the backed up pipes filled the building with the evil sewage smells, which I was becoming accustomed to. Cockroaches love electronics, so the building was a constant battlefield where paying tenants waged chemical warfare on spindly dinosaurs who threatened to carry off small children and chihuahuas. These cockroaches were mean and the size of a small house cat, born in the sewers of Mexico City from the blood of the Aztecs and the excrement of the modern city’s citizens, full of cocaine residue and taco grease. These cockroaches had big dripping dicks and breasts. They had human-like eyes and no fear. When you crunched one underneath your boot, they would unstick themselves from the ground and scuttle away under the door or out the window. Opening the window was like turning up the knob on an invisible stereo. In the street below, Republica del Salvador, every kind of boombox, sound system, car stereo and musical instrument imaginable were displayed in the shop windows, and the biggest speakers were pointed into the street blasting techno, banda, bachata and cumbia. Walking or rolling on my bicycle past each shop window was like stepping into another club scene in a post-apocalyptic Blade Runner film experiencing audio schizophrenia. The stores pointed their strobe lights and fog machines toward the sidewalk, competing to be the loudest. The cacophony was truly tremendous and I loved it. I could be anonymous in the chaos and that was when I learned the weight of freedom, because the Man won’t put food in your belly or pay your rent if you’re not working for them. Freedom is time and Chronos can be a damn heavy thing if you don’t have something to fill the hours with, because gazing dumbly into the void is to confront inevitabile and meaningless death.

So I filled the lonely hours not spent at press conferences or The News offices painting mediocre canvases and drawing portraits that no collector wanted to buy and no curator wanted to show. Gallerists came and went from my little studio without interest and mostly out of pity or a sense of obligation because I’d written something about one of their shows in The News and that's probably how we knew each other. Some of the most important gallerists and curators in the city — Anuar Maauad and Chris Sharp — visited my square little studio, which gave me temporary highs of hope for a career in painting but after almost a year of work, while paintings piled up, I hadn’t sold a single thing. All I had ever wanted to be was a famous painter, not a shoddy journalist at a corrupt newspaper. My biggest fear was failing as an artist and having to give up that which I held most closely to my heart, being that I was alone without friends or family, and certainly without someone to tie limbs and tongues together with during rainy summer nights in Mexico City. But I wasn’t making any money except to barely pay rent at Lieja 33 and the little studio, writing the occasional review or translating sometimes, and the futile task of making something worthwhile was beginning to take an emotional toll, as I became even more lonely than when my apartment got robbed, more than when I arrived to the bosom of the beast from the beach without a bed or a blanket, and even lonelier than when my heart was broken on Christmas and I was alone in the drafty, empty apartment and little strings of black ash were filling the air like snow in hell.

Then there was a little piece of paper taped to the studio’s door saying that I was to call the landlord immediately, which I definitely didn’t do — one thing I learned about Mexico City is that you shouldn’t start looking for a problem unless it's knocking on your door. A few weeks past during which I hardly painted but still made my way to the studio every day, even if by circuitous paths, sometimes only showing up in time to see the sunrise, oftentimes sleeping on the small lumpy sofa, to stare at the stacks of material looking back at me, taunting my ineptitude. But then there was a knock. It was the landlord, a tall, obviously rich, middle-aged godinez who spoke in the typical accent of a man who was born into his position as a cutthroat capitalist. The “administrator” to whom I’d paid rent for over a year had stolen the money and disappeared. He probably left the country, said the chubby owner. The contract and all the receipts were useless forgeries, he said, and the owner could sue me for the entire year of rent since I’d been technically squatting in the building. I laughed in his face, actually holding back tears of despair, and walked out of the building with some rolled up canvases under my arm and a few boxes of supplies, the owner shouting insults behind me.

“Faggot artist,” he spat at my back.

“Why don’t you do something for this piece of shit country instead, you fucking gringo.”

His insults echoed down the stairwell after me until the roar of the street cancelled out the noise from the building.

*****
The next warning was more direct: a small note scribbled hurriedly on a half sheet of printer paper stuck to my computer screen at The News office with clear tape.

“Be careful, guero, we know who you are.”

I panicked and frantically scanned the tops of heads visible behind the black monitors, but not even one reporter or editor lifted their face from the glow of their screen, their shoulders and necks hunching forward into the machine as if they would eventually become one. No, none of these people would be capable, I thought. They didn’t have the imagination or a shred of desire to go out of their way to intimidate me, but that also meant that any malicious visitor rummaging through my desk or searching files in my computer would go completely unnoticed. Though they would only find scraps of paper with half written love poems to Arco Iris and rough drafts of poorly written articles for The News. I frantically unplugged the monitor, throwing files and old papers from the drawers of my desk looking for a hidden wire or bug. I looked under the keyboard and the mouse. There was a small black memory stick in the back of my computer, probably one of my own, but I couldn’t be sure so I threw it on the ground and smashed it to pieces with the heel of my boot. Still no one in the newsroom looked up or seemed to notice. I was sweating and breathing heavily. If they were watching me, then they were probably listening too. Listening to my pathetic pleas to Arco Iris and to Therese’s harassing voicemails. Watching me masturbate into cups of paint and smear the chunky mixture onto canvas, or pee into bottles in my little studio. I overturned the entire cubicle but didn’t find any trace of a microphone or camera. The lack of an eye or an ear was even more scary for some reason. What had Arco Iris gotten me into? The sun was setting orange on the horizon underneath the clouds of acid rain and pollution, casting a sharp contrast film noir light across the office. But no one, not even me, noticed the beauty in the decaying landscape as the inevitable and futile weighed the city down and it sagged further every day into the underworld of death and cockroaches and blood and lava. For a moment I stood frozen, overwhelmed by the situation and the anonymous threat which caught me so off guard after another night of love that smelled like wet blankets and hibiscus. I finally sank into the chair, my mind running circles around the note, Arco Iris, the landlord, Lieja 33, Therese. I sat staring at the blank screen and the note, we know who you are, paralyzed by anxiety and mortality. I was finally stirred to action by the sound of a ringing phone.

“Are you going to answer that, guero?”

It wasn’t until Paco’s disheveled head appeared above the cubicle partition in front of me that I realized the sound was coming from the phone on my desk, and I stared at it as if I’d never seen one before.

“Answer the fucking phone, pendejo,” he insisted.

So I lifted the receiver to my ear and held it absentmindedly for a few seconds before slowly answering.

“Hello?”

No answer. “Si, bueno?” I tried in Spanish, but still no reply.

I could hear the room on the other end of the line. It sounded like a metro station, with a voice making indiscernible announcements over a loudspeaker. But I could also hear the sounds of machines and computers, what sounded like a whole army of switchboards and touchscreens, then the faroff sound of hushed conversations in an unfamiliar Spanish, of various men’s voices distorted by a veil of machine noise. Peeking apprehensively above the fading cubicle wall, I saw a strange, very white man in a black suit looking at me from near The News bathrooms. He quickly looked away as I relinquished behind the feeble barrier. The next time I poked my head around the other side of my computer monitor, I could still see him there, seeming to try not to look in my direction. The stranger fumbled in his pockets for his phone and I saw him lift the device to his ear as if to make a call. Without thinking, I grabbed my jacket and headed for the elevator, which loomed between me and the mysterious figure. As I made my way there so did the man in the suit, until he was standing next to me. I saw him size me up and pretend to check his phone as the elevator doors opened. As we both began to move inside, I held back until the last second before the doors closed and as he entered I made a frantic dash for the stairs. Without looking back, I ran the six flights down into the crowded street where the red twilight was beginning to give way to darkness. Glancing over my shoulder, I thought I saw the tall white man a block behind me. Pushing through the crowd as it became increasingly dense near the metro station, I dove down the stair way but didn’t jump the barrier to enter the train. Instead I kept running past the turnstals and hid behind the cart of a young indigenous woman selling spicy chips, watching the entrance until I saw the ominous figure of the white man come down the stairs, phone still in hand. He pushed through the mechanical gate without pausing and slunk away down the passage toward the train and out of sight. I gasped a breath of relief and exited the train station, looking over my shoulder every few minutes during the 45 minute walk back to Lieja 33. The neighbor, Anna, said I shouldn’t worry.

“This isn’t Argentina, pendejo.”

I gave her 200 pesos for the Wifi, pressing my cheek to hers, and I left.

*****
In the metro.

“I need to get out of town,” I texted Arco Iris. “Run away with me.”

“…” The three dots hung there on the screen in my palm.

“You’re crazy,” she finally wrote.

“Please, I’ll explain on the bus.”

“I can’t go with you,” 12:34 am. “I need to figure out my life.”

There’s nothing to figure out. Within an hour, I hopped on a discount bus headed south to the border of Guatemala. I knew that the unofficial buses didn’t have cameras or passenger logs, or bathrooms, as opposed to the luxury bus services with TVs, heat and coffee on board. We drove up and out of the valley as the sun rose through the mist, past Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, through the baroque capital of Puebla City and Orizaba with the 18,500-foot Citlaltépetl looming over the city. I ate quesadillas de chicharron on the side of the highway, chalupas and cemitas in Puebla. I had Oaxaquenos for breakfast — tamales wrapped in a palm leaf rather than a corn husk, served in a warm bun — and stained by shirt with the smokey local mole in the capital. climbing into the hills from Oaxaca city on an early morning, still shivering from the chilly night after about a week on the road. Rolling through the little hills in the golden blanket of twilight, the air sweeping in through the open window of the bus as I woke rose to exactly the same temperature as the skin on my face so I had the sensation of whipping through myself, of being embraced by the very air that I dove through. Every once in awhile a humble house of brick or corrugated steel rolled by the window amid the green and yellow tall grass and the cactuses. Rounding the tight corners, the bus wove in between near darkness and saturated sunlight in the high contrast of the final moments of daylight, and each blade of grass and every hilltop cast a long shadow. The sun started to burn of the night’s condensation causing little clouds to gather in-between the green hills marked by farmland cradling small villages. We climbed up toward the warm sun like a happy bird for another hour before reaching the town of San Agustin, following the main road all the way up to the footsteps of a colonial church I hopped down from the bus and stretched out at the foot of the church overlooking the valley, watching the final swirls of condensation evaporate into the day.

The pyramid of San Agustin had never been uncovered and its indigenous name had long been forgotten, but many colonial churches were literally built on top of pyramids during the conquest, to illustrate the universal power of God. A pack of stray dogs licked each other good morning, wrestling in the dust with big drooling smiles. I stretched out on the wide, rough-cut stones of the church wall with my head propped against my daypack and the sun blanketing me with warmth. My eyelids couldn’t help but succumb to gravity and I dozed in and out of sleep for a few minutes before a sputtering taxi broke the spell of fresh green silence. From where I was perched I had an uninterrupted view of the square and saw the taxi come to a halt, and the passenger door opened for an out-of-place young woman. She wore all black despite the mounting heat, with round rockstar sunglasses perched on her heart-shaped face, and dragging an unwieldy wheeled suitcase along the rough brick. As the taxi headed back down the hill, she looked around with her head cocked to the side and then fiddled with her phone for a minute before eventually striking out decisively on a cobblestone road leading to a compound beyond the church, the enormous plot looked to be an old factory or textile mill, and it made the old colonial church look like a side relic. I didn’t think the young woman in black had seen me, so I followed shortly behind. The textile mill was an incredible 18th century fortress where the San Agustin convent built a rich local textile industry. After years of disrepair in the 20th century, the property had finally been taken over by gringo artists and turned into a cultural center. The young woman in sunglasses was greeted by a docent upon entering into the seemingly abandoned space and I followed close behind as we became a small group when a large hairy fellow stumbled up the wide staircase into the main gallery space. I don’t remember a single artwork, but I remember their faces as if it were yesterday. What a strange encounter, this immaculate art hall in the middle of a tiny village. After arriving within seconds of each other, we were the only living souls visible within the whole complex. So we stayed in a small group and became sympathetic to one another immediately, like we were destined to meet at that end in the middle of nowhere.

“Let’s go for a walk,” the good natured, goofy young man, Ricardo, suggested. “I’ll show you my town.”

“Gladly, I’ve been on the damn bus for days,” I said, twisting my torso and wiggling my legs to get the blood flowing again.

“Let’s go,” said the out-of-place girl, Isabel, “there’s nothing better to do here.” She was back home in Oaxaca during a break from university at the UNAM in Mexico City.

As if drawn by a magnet, we walked out of the soaring gallery and into the sun where grapefruit, guava and banana trees lined the single-lane street which pointed up toward the shallow mountains beyond the old church and the textile mill. Rolling hills covered in short trees and bushes sprouting from red dirt stretched as far as I could see, as we gained altitude, passing the elementary school and the concrete soccer pitch. Abandoned heavy machinery — remnants of halted modernization — stood like guards near the last little cement houses before the pavement turned to dry clay and began to climb at a steeper pitch. We kept walking and talking without ever discussing the ascent. Isabel made comics with cute characters who suffered from chronic depression and her parents didn’t understand why she’d signed up for art school when she could have been a respectable nurse or housewife. Ricardo edited an anarchist leaning arts journal with black flags and drawings of gutted rats that represented the State. There were white and purple orchids sprouting in the cruxes of tree branches and air plants as big as cats scattered around the ground and clinging to rocks. There was no one else nearby and no wind to break the silence, so we spoke quietly and moved carefully along the trail, which became increasingly steep and difficult to navigate because it had been washed out by the summer rains. As we climbed up near the summit, where the trees were gnarled by asphyxia and then abruptly fell away entirely to shrubs and high grasses, the trail disappeared at an intersection where a small wooden cross draped with a stained white lace that looked like it belonged to a wedding dress marked a literal and metaphysical fork in the path.

“Witches gather here at night,” said Ricardo with a hushed voice. “Here, near the top, they come to do magic under the full moon, spilling chickens blood onto the dirt.”

I tried not to let the fear I felt show on my face.

There were various holes and piles of rocks arranged in ways that that seemed vaguely religious and added to the air of uncertain magic. As we came around the peak of the mountain, just above the treeline, the path in front of us disappeared into a 100 meter cliff that shot out into nothingness and trees stretching toward the horizon. We had no choice but to backtrack and route-find another way up, so we turned our gazes toward the peak and with some extra effort we passed the last steep push to find ourselves surrounded by holes in the ground that looked like children’s graves and old fire pits with burnt feathers and rotting animal organs. Feeling uneasy and slightly afraid, we stayed close together, circumnavigating the summit which rose up in three plateaus which, we had no idea, were formed by the ancient pyramid buried beneath centuries of dirt and dust. A spell protected the little mountain top. The form of a snake emerged from within one of the holes a few meters from where we huddled together in the swirling mist of the magical place. The black serpent’s obsidian scales glistened with moisture from the earth in the dark hole, which must have been a portal to the underworld, and it’s blind eyes were white like eggs. A strong smell of sulphur wafted from the earth around us as we trembled, unable to move as the monster slowly slithered toward us over the moss and rocks. Out of nowhere an eagle broke through the clouds of mist and took the snake in its claws, ripping into the flesh around the horrible white eyes, and I was relieved to see that the snake’s blood ran red. Isabel gasped, which broke the spell and the bird finally saw us, and with three strong flaps of its meter-long wings, the giant eagle was gone into the mist again with the snake still clenched in it’s claws. All at once, we felt a tremendous urge to run down, off the mountain and so we stumbled and tripped as quickly as we could out of the brambles and cactuses, cutting our hands and shins on thorns and sticks, stumbling in the dirt like children because some evilness was chasing us back to our world of hot water and sacred screens.

“What has happened to me, my animals?” I yelled, giggling with glee at the absurdity of the spirit of the pyramid chasing us down the mountain, stopping to catch our breath where the paved road began again.

“Am I not transformed? Hath not bliss come unto me like a whirlwind? To my friends can I again go down the mountain, and also to mine enemies — down toward sunrise and sunset. Out of silent mountains and storms of affliction, rusheth my soul into valleys!”

This is an absurd place, indeed, I thought to myself, echoing Zarathustra, suddenly having an extreme sense of déjà vu as I felt myself experience the same deep absurdity at the museum of modern art in Mexico City and another time in the forest when I must have been a child. It was a sense of collapsed time so powerful that I nearly lost my balance. Isabel and Ricardo ignored me and kept walking, as I stood for a long time staring out into the valley that stretched below the town of San Agustin like a patchwork quilt of farmland and haciendas, with an occasional settlement of cheaply built houses for workers who couldn’t afford to live in the city.

I suddenly realized I was alone and hurried down the hill to meet the unlikely pair who continued to descend into the town without me. Following Ricardo down a series of streets, the first one paved, the second brick and the third entirely dirt, we ended up in a field of corn facing a corrugated tin shack with hand painted advertisements for Coca Cola and prepaid phone cards. The store had dirt floors and it was extremely humble, almost minimal, but clean and pleasant smelling. The earth had been recently swept and smelled of fertility and food. A woman so old that it was impossible to guess her age (I was sure she was the oldest person I’d ever seen, at least 100) appeared behind the counter fashioned from a few wooden barrels and an old door.

“Doña Nati!” exclaimed Ricardo. “Doña Nati is the oldest woman in all of Oaxaca, and her family makes the best mezcal.”

She filled a two liter soda bottle with the spicy poison, and we bought tortillas and meat to cook over a fire. Drinking the bottle around a small folding table, we relived our adventure from the day, and with every shot of the smoky tasting, crystal clear liquor we became more convinced of the evilness we’d disturbed on the mountain. Oh, Arco Iris, you should have been there, so we could have tickled the shivers out of each other with little bites and whispers.

I told my two new friends about the robbery, the passport left open on my plastic dining table, and the note stuck to my computer at the offices of The News.

“Shit man, you’re lucky,” said Ricardo. “You know what they do? They give you three strikes. First, they give you a warning, then they scare you — maybe this happened in reverse in your case — but then it’s over. If you don’t stop what you’re doing they kill you, and in Mexico City no one will notice, and dissolve your body in acid so there’s no trace.”

“Fuck,” I said, “What should I do?”

“Well, first of all, stop doing whatever you’re doing to piss them off.”

“I have no fucking clue. I work for a shitty newspaper that all the gringos on vacation at the beach used to read, and they censor anything good I try to write anyway.”

“Damn, hombre,” said Ricardo, slowly sipping from his glass. “It’s either someone you know or someone you really pissed off.”

“My uncle got kidnapped two years ago,” said Isabel with a look of indifference on her face. “They held him in a concrete silo for almost a month before my family scraped together the money to pay off the sequestradores... He’s been a little messed up ever since.”

“The pastor at my childhood church disappeared during mass,” said Ricardo. “A group of men stormed right through the front door with machine guns and took him away in a black SUV. The police never found any trace of him. Not that they tried very hard, they’re more scared of being disappeared than anyone else.”

“My uncle said that it was the police,” said Isabel. “The two pigs who worked at his son’s primary school. They tried to take the little boy, but my tio insisted that the family would pay and not make any trouble if they took him instead.”

“Well it wouldn’t do them any good to kidnap me anyway, right?” I said, laughing nervously. “I don’t have any family in Mexico. No one would pay.”

“Yeah, they don’t usually go after foreigners,” she replied. “It’s too much trouble.”

“Should be careful,” Ricardo said in a hushed voice. “They’re obviously watching you.”

Who was watching me? My life was entirely unremarkable except for Arco Iris, who at the moment was painfully far away and hadn’t answered my calls since I’d left (she would say that I was being paranoid). Lying in bed that night pouring over my situation I came to the conclusion that the two were connected. I knew that one of her exes, an older guy from tje neighborhood, sometimes worked for the government. He was a contractor or maybe even owner of a big developer that did construction for the state. Every once in a while, he would try to get her to go out with him again. so maybe, I thought, he wanted me out of the picture. They were trying to scare me out of Mexico, away from her.

Waiting for the bus back to tropical Gotham from Oaxaca, I found my way to a stereotypical cantina near the station and ordered something to eat — a big chicken breast with black mole oaxaqueño, which isn’t sweet at all and tastes like the minerals in the mountains and the charcoal smoke filling the Pasillo del Humo in the central market. I was sad to leave my new friends, but I knew that my solitude was absolute unless I had Arco Iris, and that Isabel and Ricardo would go about their lives undisturbed by the shadow that plagued me, the smell of blood and dried chili in the very dirt of Mexico. There was no kitchen in the bar, but the waiter zipped out the little swinging doors into the night and came back half an hour later carrying a steaming plate with the chocolaty sauce threatening to spill over the boundary of the plates edge, and a basket of warm tortillas wrapped in a hand embroidered cloth. I’d already thrown back a two and a half mezcals by then so the greasy meal fell into my stomach like a miracle, and I mopped every last bit of it up with the chewy tortillas and chased every few bites with a swig of the clear liquor. Oh what a joy to be lost in a bendy elongated moment of drunk laughing and sloppy eating with the bartenders there in that little brick cantina where I was the only customer. You can imagine my return to the bus station. I felt happy and unafraid to face the city again with it’s many tormentors and specters and lovers, even the ones who threatened me and seemed to wish I’d leave. But the ticket lady politely suggested I should chew some gum before clambering on board the bus because the mezcal on my breath was giving her a hangover. So I mashed a few pieces of mint into my mouth and sat there farting happily like a gorilla for another 15 minutes until my bus was called for departure. Once on board, it didn’t take long for the mezcal to drop my head to the dirty seat and I’m sure I snored loudly. I remember that it was cold, riding over the Paseo de Cortez and dropping into the big dirty valley. I was shaken awake by a fellow passenger once we’d already docked in the bus terminal and I peered out through my headache into the bright eyes of the city. It wasn’t until I plopped into a cab that I looked at my wrist for the time and realized my watch had been swiped while I slept.

*****
I longed to travel somewhere cold with Arco Iris, because she brought summer wherever she went. She was the young spring that coaxed green shoots from the sleepy ground with her legs, the smell of her hair made the flowers leap from their buds. I wanted to be snowed in under a blizzard with nowhere to go but deeper into her. I wanted to keep a log cabin warm with our lovemaking. But even those hazy-red predawn memories were retreating further into my mind, every day their fireworks were less vivid. The hazy streets of December in Mexico City chased away fantasies of summer blooming between us, and the sulfur-dioxide made my eyes red instead. Dipping behind the smog at dusk, the sun was a beating red heart sending beams of glowing dust through the narrow residential streets. Rather than being defined by a series of notable events, days were defined by only what was missing. Arco Iris. The general state of affairs degraded further during the first few months of the year, after that terrible Christmas. They said the Russians had a tape of our dear Gringo president in a hotel room filled with Russian prostitutes. Well, that’s less scandalous than WaterGate, everyone knows Nixon slept with whores too, who else would sleep with those reptiles — the old white men, I mean. But the tape, strategically captured by hidden cameras put in place by Putin himself, showed the orange reptilian overlord being pissed on by these girls! And, according to those hidden faces who said they’d seen the video, he loved it, gurgling the women’s warm fluids in his mouth and rubbing it over his flabby chest. A hacker I met at a very strange party in La Condesa told me he’d seen the original footage. War was certain. Nowhere was safe. It was a strange moment of inframince, as Duchamp would call it.

When the end was already everywhere around us — the city was awash in grey — Arco Iris and I enjoyed a hidden, secret love. We kissed during the middle of the day in the shade of sunny parks and dark subway cars. We were the couple that I sneered at, hiding in a tunnel of the metro station like an insect made of lips, under inconspicuous awnings and in cafes where we thought our secret fire would be safe to burn. In the hidden corners of the monster city we blew on the embers in each others’ eyes, burning. Stumbling around, not focusing on anything but her face, we wandered into the sculpture gardens of the Museo de Arte Moderno. In one of the galleries where the walls were painted midnight blue and the lights were kept low to protect oil paintings by the magic-surrealist Remedios Varo from the decay of time, we found perfect corners to hide in the mist and kiss wildly. Infatuation’s such a rush, crooned Mr. Ocean in the background of my mind while her lips bounced against mine.

“We have to be a secret,” she said to me.

“Being secret with you sounds serious to me — just, I mean, I’m bad at secrets, but, yes, yes, please, let's be a secret.”

Hold each other lightly. Oh please, because the end will wipe us away lightly, like ash dust turned to black dye by water. As lightly as the world was woven by the heart-faced women in Remedios Varo’s Bordando el Manto Terrestre, the same triptych Thomas Pynchon saw at the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1964, writing Gravity’s Rainbow from an airy apartment in the Hipodromo neighborhood where the rooms that unfolded into courtyards and high ceilings with white rococo trim. But Pynchon spent entire weeks there alone, filling up the rooms with his paranoia and imagination. It’s easy to see the reclusive writer penning that twisting Sisyphean labyrinth of a manuscript in the belly of the techno-beast. The women in the painting sit in a golden tower weaving a fine tapestry which falls from the windows in the form of oceans and mountains. Kissing Arco Iris in that deep blue gallery, we knitted part of the tapestry woven over several thousand years of human necessity with our tongues and fingers, and the ghostly figures in Remedios Varo’s paintings wove into the sculptures on the museum lawns that disappeared into the Bosque de Chapultepec. The ultimate pioneer, necessity, drove new layers of concrete and glass toward the sky before the earthquakes could tumble them down. And it must have been there in that museum that Pynchon saw the same painting some decades ago; funny how we were jumping across time like that. I couldn’t think of anything except sucking up as much of Arco Iris’s breath as possible, she was the tapestry of the world and Gravity’s Rainbow, but the author and the painter went unnoticed by our threesome — Arco Iris, myself, and the city babbling in the background of our kissing.

*****
On my way back to Lieja 33 from The News offices in the rickety bus where condensation beaded up inside the windows from the stubborn sweaty people uncomfortably standing in traffic inching along slower than walking, a crowd of protesters rumbled through the gridlock. A small pack of anarchist teens on the fringe of the mass banged on the glass and shook the bus violently as the crowds rolled by — no one in the bus looked up from their screens. Shortly after an unseasonal winter rain storm, on an afternoon around Christmas that felt like summer, I stood daydreaming blankly out the window as the sun began to set, sending a beautiful orange pollution glow through the crooked streets. The dust and exhaust fumes in the air hung thick and hazy with the orange light. Two blind guitar players felt their way aboard the bus and toward the midsection, tuning their instruments as they maneuvered around the standing passengers with grim looks. After settling in (we weren’t going anywhere in a hurry in this traffic) the two men's’ fingers sprung into action in a whirr of classical scales and folkloric arpeggios, filling the stuffy cabin with happy noise. At the same moment the bus was inching its way down Reforma avenue near the Angel of Independence, and the crowd of squat, bare-chested women and men holding banners and picket signs danced into the gridlock surrounding the bus. Every passenger’s phone buzzed in unicen with an emergency notification: There had just been an earthquake. But the guitar players carried on playing, unfazed by the suddenly worried passengers. While the mass of meaty bodies flowed between cars, the office buildings lining the six-lane Reforma avenue opened up like faucets and thousands of dark suits poured out into the streets below, evacuating the premises, everyone remembered the September 19 earthquakes A few were unlucky enough to live through both, 32 years apart. Like fluids, the blue and black suits mixed with the rows of cars and the naked protesters. For a few minutes everyone was looking at their phones and watches nervously, needing to be somewhere, but the gridlock became totally impossible. There was a collective resignation to the inevitability of the surreal moment, and, as the sun began to set, an old man worked his way through traffic selling popsicles and fruit sorbet. Assorted coughs broke the silence on the bus. Everyone in Mexico City has a cough. They hack up brownish yellow phlegm and don’t talk about it because it could be a common cold or whatever, but it’s definitely not the city choking you. In the morning I would spit thick balls into the sink without ceremony or alarm, like an eternal bronchitis. The literal suffocation and synonymous drowning of a place like Mexico City made the banality of my home in the United States seem incredibly annoying. Endless, meaningless striving for primitive satiation, sex and food, is a million times worse than choking on ash and dust, getting beaten back by urban and inner monsters in search of a new experience. Though it may be true that the drive to seak meaning amid the ridiculous and mediocre is as primitive as the drive to fuck.


*****











*****


“Arco Iris, I’m so sorry that your heart was broken by such a great loss.”

Send.

“It’s going to be okay, I promise you will feel better.”

Send.

(…)

Two blue check marks. Online.

(…)

Last seen at 12:34 pm…

She flew away like the butterflies fly to Michoacán, like the flower petals and ash dust caught in the wind, swept into the sky, bathing the city in a velvety afternoon sunlight carrying the beginnings of monsoon season into the streets. I listened to the rhythm of raindrops bouncing off the jacaranda trees in my little studio, breathing paint fumes while trucks rumbled through the street sludge below, rattling the windows and ripping air with the noise of their tired engines every few minutes. Before, jacarandas announced springtime in the Valley of Mexico, painting the city with purple petals felled from the canopy by heavy rain drops. But toward the end the jacarandas were like canaries of Valentine’s Day, and then finally New Year and Christmas. as the purple petals fell into beds of black ash, preserved forever under the layers of carbon.

Living between real time and digitalism, trying to remain in between sweet moments forever, I tried to keep Arco Iris in my bed forever, even if to call it a bed would be to stretch the definition: a piece of furniture for sleep, typically a framework with a mattress and coverings. Time in bed is flexible, like a vinyl record shaken by footsteps or flicked by a fingertip. Or like the Jacaranda trees, unbound by our time, subject only to the whims of nature. But human time, digital time, is controlled by machines that create an invisible web across the globe, as inflexible as any 0 and 1 binary. Unfortunately, the modern mortal can only escape the incessant time of man a few times during their life, unless they manage to actually break free, which is only possible if you return to nature entirely or if life is art. LSD and other psychedelic drugs can also allow us momentary glimpses into the other side of time. The office worker is trapped in machine time, while the dancer moves through old time, bending reality with her legs and arms, stretching gravity as she floats across the floor. One misty night, we snuck onto the roof of the Torre Latinoamericana and Arco Iris twirled in between the big spotlights pointed toward the monstrous radio antenna beaming waves into the ether, lifting her legs through the sky in arcs like shooting stars, while the glow from the LED screens ascending the antenna and the skyscraper reflected on her moist skin in red, ochre and silver. The illusion of the lights made it look like there were three of her, arms trailing in the air like hummingbird wings and leaving painterly gestures hanging in the misty night.

*****
During that time, I slept on a piece of foam plus the same two cotton mats, and stained white cotton sheets stretched over the awkward pile, draped with a heavy wool blanket from Oaxaca with psychedelic patterns in bright colors and geometric pyramid shapes. I was too deep into existentialism and too lustful for the sweetness of flesh and dirt to be bothered with capitalism and the greasy, squishy life that it purported to promote. Quite the Marxist anti capitalist I thought myself then, or told myself in order to make up for the unbearable lightness of living in a poor world fully aware of all extravagance. There’s even a certain freedom in having nothing. The only thing to do then is be yourself — live in the world without trying to consume it. A friend invited me to teach art classes at a shelter for migrant women and children fleeing death and destitution in El Salvador and Honduras (before the uprising in Venezuela). Feeling self righteous, nothing could have prepared me for the reality of touching poverty in that close proximity. While I wallowed in poorness of imagination, pretending to be poor, the kids tried to eat the crayons and paints. The younger ones walked around with their own waste running down their legs from overflowing diapers. One little boy, Nelson, told me that saw a classmate of his, a little girl of six or seven, get shot through the heart and died from a stray bullet in the school yard. He said that police came to his neighborhood and executed his older brother in front of him too. One of the teens had made the journey on crutches: Two years before, when she was 13, she had been shot by accident in her own kitchen on the way to the fridge to get some juice. Her leg had to be amputated, but she decided to run anyway.

“One leg is better than none!” she smiled. The journey hadn’t been too bad, she said, except for not eating for a few days here and there.

“Thanks to god, I’m here now.”

None of these kids had dads, and they made the journey on foot and by bus, running from police and border patrol with their brave and stoic mothers. Though the teenagers came alone. Everyone in the shelter shared one meal of rice and beans each afternoon. So then I knew real poverty, because I touched it and it touched me with tiny dirt-covered hands, and drool from bawling babies who called me papa and clung to my shirt while I tried to sit them at a desk to learn. How flaccid my paintbrush felt against the human horrors I saw there in that secret refuge of desperation and resilience. What a stupid tool, this little stick with hairs and lavish tubes of pretty colors! I said to myself after an afternoon in the shelter, barely controlling total chaos while a young nun looked on unperplexed and unfazed by the opera unfolding there in the little courtyard — the clash of civilizations echoing through time — as I tried to make these hungry bellies sit and put pen to paper.

Oh, how my imagination flailed and faltered in the face of real suffering and my tower of idealization crumbled into paranoias and disappointments. I hated what came out of that weak little stick with a tuft of hair, the paintbrush that I once revered as a god. The fumes from the paints made me sick and, running to the window for fresh air, I was only beaten back by the suffocating stench of sewage rising from the cobblestone streets with the heat and the noises of the city. The fantasy of bohemia and museum exhibitions evaporated into sewage smells, and the wind carrying grey ash also blew away the dust of my lifelong dream ground down by real life. But I was stubborn! I wallowed in the suffering of creating worthless art, of being worthless, because it was my American duty. I suffered by choice and it was freedom, stacking up towers of canvases that haunted my sleep and paranoias as if they were real characters. I was special. So I would eat off the floor and run up credit cards if it meant avoiding the monotonous, banal life of conformity.

During sleep troubled by paranoid sweats and mosquitos, I dreamed that I’d been awarded a big painting show at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris or the Whitney Museum in New York. The space was an unrecognizable, homogenous white cube with white people drinking white wine everywhere, a typical scene. Suddenly the babble of small talk died down and, to my horror, everyone turned to look at me, all with the same lifeless expression of expectation and indifference. Women in long black dresses and pinstriped baggy pants, and men with round glasses gazed at me intently as if waiting for something. I couldn’t turn my head, or move my hands or legs. I tried to say something.

“Hello?”

But no one could hear me and their lifeless expressions didn’t change. They stood unflinching. Then I realized that I was a painting, at which they were expectantly gazing! I was trapped in my own composition, destroyed into abstraction and all these bourgeoisie were praising me. As I looked on helplessly, all the men and women turned into the same sexless person in red bell bottoms and a big flowery purple hat — how ridiculous they looked! My terror grew and I was still paralyzed within the picture plane, powerless but to watch as the critic’s expression turned from blank expectation to puzzled with a slight disapproving head angle, and finally to blasé disgust. They hated me!

“This is shit,” one voice with a thousand mouths echoed through the gallery.

“I’ve never seen a more worthless picture in my life.”

Suddenly the figure of the critic morphed into Therese, The News editor, with her vulture like, humpback lean and twitchy face. What is she doing here? She lurched toward me like the grim reaper. I could see blue veins under her pale translucent skin as she dragged her lanky bulk toward the canvas where I was trapped. I could hear her labored breathing and the click of her heels on the marble floor as she came close enough that I could have touched her, I could have strangled her, had I not been frozen in paint.

“They are advertisers!”

“A child could paint this,” she screeched with contempt, spittle from her mouth spraying the canvas, spraying me, helpless, and I withered further into two dimensional hell.

Her jowls looked like the squished face of a little bulldog. Now the terror was dizzying and Therese’s face began to melt as the gallery behind her dissolved as she hissed incoherently and tears ran down her face. I was pulled from the canvas and propelled backward in an instant to the dungeon-like offices of The News and Therese’s voice echoed all around as I was sucked through the computer screen, and printed on the front page of The News, frozen and imprisoned, thrown onto doorsteps and stacked up in hotel lobbies. When I woke up Arco Iris was shaking me, and then running her long fingers through my hair. She kissed me. “It’s okay, I’m here.”

“You were just dreaming,” she whispered and held me closely, squeezing hard so that I wouldn’t fall back through the screen and into the nightmare.

I held onto her trembling and letting each kiss she planted on my shoulder blades bring me back to earth a little more. I reached for her breasts with my hands like a child, forgetting the darkness in her flesh, and then kissed her inner thighs, biting a little too hard so she let out a cry of pain and then giggled devilishly. The smell of my sweaty nightmare mixed with her sweet juice and I lapped it up with my tongue, forgetting about my dream and drinking from her until she came. As we twirled there in my little bed of foam and cotton, the sun began to cast its first blue-grey light over the city and the night’s thunderstorms rolled over the volcanoes, and my little house trembled as the first metro passed beneath our sticky lovemaking. Then there was just ash and dead birds, and red afternoons with spicy smoke and wet books.

*****
I knew all was lost when the air around being together started to smell like burning hair. Cooking rice became cause for a funeral, and a couples offensive love on the metro made me want to vomit in my mouth. God damn the reality of love, when the hottest wild tobala mezcal can’t even wash the taste of pennies out of your mouth. We said things and had sex just to fill the gigantic emptiness between us with some friction and noise, so that it didn’t fill with fear. Is eating poison better than starving? You know what comes next: her smell in the sheets, a sock under the bed, photos on an old harddrive. Plagued by the ultimate fear of not being who I thought I was, a soon-to-be famous painter, I wrestled with my work at the newspaper, where I lived in a world of censorship and bribery, and I fought myself like hell in my studio to make something, while cockroaches stalked my shadow and the windows rumbled every few minutes with vibrations from the dark world under the city.

Tuesday morning found me at the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso for a press conference inaugurating an art exhibition. A series of saints made from recycled religious sculptures and redimentry mechanical machines martyred themselves in the old palace galleries. The former boarding school turned museum is where Diego Rivera first laid eyes on a virginal Frida Kahlo, whose 14 years were more than doubled by Rivera’s considerable age. No wonder Frida lived and died in a purgatory state, a martyr in her own way, both among the most overrated artists used to suspend Mexico’s art scene in a state of post-revolution modernism officially romanticized for tourists and nationalists. The sainthood of Mexico’s power couple, printed on the 500 peso bill, began with pedeofelia. The new saints in the museum were post-apocalyptic, half-robot half-renaissance sculptures. They filled the museum with a tremendous racket from their jerry-rigged mechanics using recycled bicycles and lawn mower parts. I was delighted by their destructiveness and disruption of the sacred silence. Diego saw Frida here while he painted his first mural, which still remains in the auditorium to this day. A lovely little section of the mural is empty, a pause in the composition in the shape of the organ that once sang there. Long before Rivera painted the auditorium mural, Jose Clemente Orozco created three dominant nationalist murals showing Christ destroying his cross, the god Tzontémoc, and native maternal and origin-myth symbolism. But Orozco was politically radicalized by the revolution in 1910 and insisted on erasing entire sections of the murals at the boarding school and replacing them with Marxist, anti-bourgeoisie caricatures who rise up against their oppressors. But Rivera and Orozco were only two of many famous Mexicans with double lives. Muralist David Alfonso Siqueiros led an assassination attempt on Leon Trotsky at his hideout in Coyoacan. The painter failed. Just like he failed to be taken seriously among the artist elite and to catch Frieda’s attention. How could ugly Diego attract any pretty girl? Siqueiros fled after the failed assassination — after all, artists aren’t good for war — and someone else finally succeeded where the painter failed. An unwitting agent of the USSR, Siqueiros wanted to kill Trotsky, not out of loyalty to Stalin, but because the exiled socialist had an affair with Khalo while seeking refuge in Rivera’s home.

*****
Yesterday we visited the San Ildefonso Museum to view the Darwin exhibition, thanks to The News. It was of particular interest since son George and his wife are on their way to the Galapagos Islands after this stop in Mexico....this is vacation time from their foreign service work in New Delhi {U.S. Embassy minister/counselor and soon Deputy Chief of Mission}. The article and photos of Jennifer are splendid! Thank you again. — email from painter Kathleen Clement dated September 10.

*****
Tension was high at The News offices after a staff meeting presided over by Therese, who we called “The Vulture” behind her back. Not two seconds after I sat at my desk, she swooped down close enough that I could smell her breath and saw specks of spit hit my screen, insisting on giving me ride to my next press conference. She was also looking for sympathy. Therese broke down to tears in the back seat of her Mercedes, as the driver inched the car down Reforma, where the Modern Art Museum and the Tamayo museum are bisected by the royal boulevard.

“They all hate me,” Therese sobbed about The News’ staff, trying to huddle close to me in the back seat of the car.

“I don’t even know why I try to help you people out.”

The poor driver glanced hesitantly in the rear-view mirror. Sometimes I had the stomach-turning feeling that Therese was coming on to me. I patted her shoulder awkwardly but couldn’t bring myself to put an arm around her.

“I was prima ballerina,” she whimpered.

“Am I so terrible?”

“Therese, no one hates you,” I said half sarcastically, itching to jump out of the car and run into the Bosque de Chapultepec.

Those ancient trees and lagoons where Nezahualcóyotl, the poet king, roamed amid the sacred grounds, were so close I could almost touch them, but Therese insisted that we lunch together. What a nightmare — missing the afternoon sun in an airconditioned diner with a teary bat. But while I tried to imagine an excuse to eliminate the possibility of eating together, we were still stuck in traffic surrounded by the green park. While Therese burbled on like a child, I could see the top of the castle on the little hill where battles rumbled in the centuries since Nezahualcóyotl’s rule. In the mornings I would run two laps around Chapultepec’s main circuit while the sun heated the bricks, wet from the night’s rain, making the fresh morning leap up from the earth in a musty mist that hung between the trees. While other guys might ask a woman that they’re crazy about to a party and try to get her drunk, I invited Arco Iris to have breakfast with me in Chapultepec. In the morning light she looked even more magical than she had on the bus the smoggy morning that we met. Eating fruit and pastries, with hot coffee from a big blue thermos, we lounged in the grass amid the ghosts of the aztec poet and fallen soldiers; the heroic Niños Héroes, teenage cadets who threw themselves from the castle walls in desperation — some say in inebriation — during the battle for Mexico City in the Mexican-American war, smoked cigarettes in the misty shadows. We inched closer to each other on a striped wool blanket in the shade of a big umbrella palm, letting the day pass by as cooly as the shadows slipped across her clavicle and up her neck. The shadow stopped over her mouth and I kissed it, capturing time between her lips and mine so that our breakfast in the park would never end. I was on my way back to The News offices from a press conference at the Palacio de Bellas Artes the first time that I saw her. She got on the front of the pesero as I was squished in between two sweaty godinez in the back of the bus. Of course I wasn’t brave enough to talk to her then. But a few weeks later when she climbed aboard again and worked her way through the white collared crowd toward me, my heart quickened and my palms made the railing slippery with sweat. I’ve never been more grateful for a traffic jam. I couldn’t believe she wasted energy turning her perfect oblong face toward mine, let alone that she had eyes for me and let me see her naked on the second date. Even far away from her, the idea of Arco Iris only grew in me as her breath blew life into the embers in my eyes. But even then, at the very beginning, I think I knew that she would leave before I had a chance to believe she was real. The flowery picnic in the park with the ghosts of soldiers and kings ended, and the kiss ended, then the ash and dust was picked up by the creeping wind and the afternoon sunlight made everything hazy red, and the day ended. Everything ended before it even began, and began because it had already ended. Now there’s just the torturous tune of a christmas carol somewhere in the haze, and Karl Marx disguised as Santa Claus is leaving plastic Coca-Cola bottles under all the plastic trees.

"Maybe we should walk," I asked Therese sarcastically, gesturing to the dense traffic over her shoulder.

"Ha!" Tears still rolling down her transluscent cheeks, and lips bordering on a smile.

"I wouldn't be caught dead."

*****
I must have an angel because a metaphysical force always managed to point me toward Lieja 33. Like a compass in the night, I stumbled down crooked streets as the birds began to twiddle before the sun. Waking up with vomit splatters on the cuffs of my nice linen trousers, jacket missing and phone dead. When the city was quiet except for the ever-present bass rumble from beneath the streets, from far away I heard the call of the tamale man.

“Hay tamales, oaxaqueños, tamales calientitos,” the man sang over and over, pedaling a squeaky three-wheeled cargo bike down the middle of the street, with big steam -pots full of the hot masa wrapped in corn husks and banana leaves.

At first, his song simply filled the cool blue air, which was just beginning to glow with the first hints of sunrise, and I spun in circles trying to locate which direction the sound was coming from — the haunting chant seemed to be coming from out of the thick air itself.

“Hay tamales, oaxaqueños, tamales calientitos.”

No, the other way! It was coming from behind me, and he suddenly swept out from behind a cloud of swirling darkness. I could smell the spicy pork and chocolate mole! A single fluorescent light bulb hanging down from a big plastic beach umbrella illuminated the riches of corn and projected a round orb into the mist as my hero the tamale man rolled up.

“What do you want, guero?”, he said.

“What is there,” I answered after considerable effort spent trying to uncross my eyes and stand straight. “Do you have green?”

“I have whatever you want,” he said, tapping his pockmarked nose with his index finger. “Green, red and white.”

I’d never heard of a white tamale before. But he grinned at me with a mouth full of missing or gold teeth and a sideways glance. I was paranoid he knew how drunk I was, so I ordered one of each and got out of there with my angel guiding me home. The barrel chested hero of Tenochtitlan, the tamale man and his tricycle full of treasures, disappeared back into the mist behind me. A few streets later, I unwrapped the first greasy tamale filled with green chili and pork, throwing the corn husks on the concrete like flower petals. What life it brought me with it’s greasy, spicy goodness! After greedily sucking down the first tamale sitting on the curb like an invalid, I peeled away the petals from the remaining white tamale and sunk my teeth into the steamy masa. But rather than tear through hot meat and salsa, my teeth dug into bitter plastic. In my inebriation I took another bite, but couldn’t chew it either because a white powder spilled out of my tamale. Cocaine! For the next hour, sitting there on the curb with my head between my knees, I forced myself to vomit up the contents of my stomach until it was only bile. Eventually I felt confident that I wasn’t going to overdose and die right there in the gutter from my mouthful of coke. I knew I’d eaten at least a gram in one bite. Luckily, the alcohol made vomiting a relief and I sobered up enough to get home in time to sleep for a few hours and shower before my shift at The News.

*****
I pitied Therese, but I pitied her daughter even more. The poor girl must have suffered as a child. Despite everything, though she’d been born to a vulture (Therese) and a rat (a scam lawyer who overdosed on a cocktail of pills), Constance was about to graduate medical school. But there was the small hiccup that, of all the diplomats available, she chose the ambassador from Iraq to Mexico as her vetted and bonafide groom. They would be married in spring.

“What a deluge of exploding shit!” screamed Therese, convinced that Constance’s fiance was a terrorist spy, which she explained to The News staff in incoherent panic along with several racist diatribes.

“I’m not racist — they want to kill us all!”

Not only that, but the daughter had every intention in the world of practising medicine in Iraq — a noble and dangerous cause. Constance the princess went missing after a teary, screechy argument with her mom on the terrace of a Condesa cafe. By morning, after Constance never turned up at home, Therese frantically yelled into the phone at a source in the Israeli embassy to tap her daughter’s phone, to spy on the illicit love affair and save Mexico City from the likes of the jihadist. She sent the diabolical politics reporter, a drugged up Englishman called James, and and the pot-head photographer, Pako, in pursuit if the missing young woman. Staked out in front of the Iraqi embassy apartment building, our two heroes had to sit in the hot car for hours and wait with the poor, downtrodden driver who worked every day except Sunday as Therese’s coat rack, chofer, and he’d recently been promoted to private detective. Constance wasn’t actually missing, said a rumor around the office the next day, she had been kidnapped for ransom by a multinational cartel. Therese never showed up to the office. No, she ran away with her Iraqi lover, leaving Therese sputtering and spitting spittle across our computer screens in exacerbated paranoia. Therese visited the Israeli embassy at the end of each day and actually listened to her own daughter’s phone conversations — that’s why she hadn’t been around and neglected her duties at The News (as if we didn’t actually prefer when she didn’t show up). All was relatively peaceful, if not just quiet and drab in the weird smell of office when she was out. I wish it wasn’t true, but I swear on my love with Arco Iris that is what she said.

“I won’t let her be radicalized by that raghead!” she squealed.

Gosh, is it more pathologically ill and evil to lie about secretly recording your own child’s phone calls, or to actually do it without remorse? We stared at each other in disbelief, though we’d learned to keep our mouths shut so as to make the suffering of her tyrannical word vomit stop sooner. The managing editor, Armando, wept silently in desperation as she skulked out of the office in a tornado of high heels and lint, having conducted no business. I wonder if she bugged my phone. Of course, the daughter was married to the suspicious Iraqi diplomat regardless of Therese’s maternal spy operation, and there was no exploding shit in Mexico City until later.

In a twist of surreal fate, around the same time that Therese blackmailed the Israeli embassy in Mexico City so that they would tap her daughter’s phone, the news broke on El Pais TV that the Mexican government had been bugging journalists’ phones and computers using software purchased from the Israeli government. The software, which was sold under the agreement that it only be used for investigating and arresting criminals, sent cryptic phishing messages to prominent human rights activists, lawyers and journalist. The messages would arrive in text messages or emails from the number +52155330000, claiming that a daughter or favorite nephew had been kidnapped, the dog run over by a garbage truck, or some similarly believable tragedy. The story was fed to a New York Times reporter by a lawyer, Alberto de la Mora Alvaro, who, when the reporter arrived to the apartment in Colonia Santa María la Ribera, threw both their cell phones directly into the microwave. The reporter thought the lawyer was being paranoid and he impatiently tapped his foot on the tile floor while the lawyer anxiously told him their phones were being hacked into and used as personal spy devices. The pegasus software even allowed the user to take over the camera of victims’ devices, to watch them at their most intimate and ugly moments. Alarma magazine was the first to report that the government had a copy of the journalist Carmen Aristegui’s sex tape, her with another woman, which it used to blackmail her into submission and complacency. Her son was even bugged and implicated in the use of cocaine and methamphetamine at a party with other high society teens. The New York Times journalist was horrified to realize that he’d received identical messages to those Aristegui was sent by the unknown number and that he too was under surveillance by the state. Another famous television personality and host, Carlos Loredo Salvador, carried no less than seven cell phones with him at all times in order to foil any efforts to track him or his conversations, according to the reporter, which might have been overkill or flamboyance, but, I suppose, everyone had to overcome in their own way. Of course, The News didn’t waste any ink on the controversy — that wouldn’t be very PRI, would it? Still though, my paranoia grew, and the feeling of always needing to look over my shoulder only became more profound. As I shoved my way into subway cars overflowing with limbs or made my way down narrow cobblestone streets hugging brick walls to avoid the rain, I swore that shadows in suits followed just far enough behind to avoid my gaze in murky doorways. When Therese called my phone, which she was sure to do at least a half dozen times every day, I heard a third person breathing somewhere between she and I. Not that we had anything to hide at The News, but they must have had a tail on Therese, or at least kept an eye on her, if only to assure her loyalty the the party — it was unshaken, as long as she could play the high-society bourgeoisie at official events. She warned me to keep my nonconformist opinions to myself, or else. She punished transcendance from the status quo with torturous office hours. Surely, that’s how they caught onto my — how should I say it? — problems with authority. I learned my lesson though, I promise, and I was never political again. I fulfilled my duties at the newspaper obediently, though with an attitude of indifference, and at night I painted abstract portraits of women with something that reminded me of Arco Iris, with her perfect thumble niples and pillowy lips. Oh god, I nearly died trying to paint her.

*****
Passing the time nakedly on a muggy winter’s day, with sheets and clothes strewn about the floor around the bed, Arco Iris told me about a favorite professor at university who had pontificated to the class that civilizations and cities should be judged, not by skyscrapers or highways, but by their sewage systems — what is hidden underground and away from sight. When Cortez rode into the Valley of Mexico and beheld the empire of Tenochtitlan, he couldn’t believe his ignorant eyes: dual aqueducts, one being cleaned while the other carried drinking water through the city to the Templo Mayor, the great pyramid dismantled by the conquistadors and used as raw material for the largest colonial cathedral in the Americas. Nothing in Europe came close to the majesty of the Aztec capital. Cortez said it himself. On the same spot in Mexico City, where the streets weave a labyrinthian spiderweb big enough to contain the whole world and trap innocent passers-by in the maze like helpless insects, the sewage system is, for lack of a more pleasant adjective, totally fucked. Only a small percentage of wastewater will be treated, the rest flows from the city in giant putrid canals where the poorest peasants use the black liquid to irrigate small crops and boil it to cook. As a result of the shitty situation, in most buildings, especially those pre-modern classics, but even in many new condos and offices, it’s criminal and potentially catastrophic to flush your used toilet paper down the drain. Instead, in every bathroom — I should specify, in all the bathrooms not contained within a tacky resort (so you probably never noticed) — there’s a small trashcan full of shit and piss stained bathroom tissue. It’s for this reason, that the toilet paper sold in Mexico is heavily scented with fake flowery essence, because, you can imagine, I’m sure, how that little trashcan festers with the smell of rancid human waste. The evil stench, halfway masked by the perfumed paper fills Mexico City restrooms with a sickly sweet, human scent, which is unmistakable and inescapable throughout the maze of concrete, ancient ruins and steel. Wafting in terrible waves from the drains and trash cans, and through open bathroom windows, even in the streets the intolerable stench hits the casual walker in a wave of noxious choking fumes in the back of the throat; even in the richest and most luxurious parts of the city, walking past a busy restaurant with Italian food or bloody cuts of grilled Argentinian meat, the smell of raw sewage is omnipresent. The city is all smells and sounds.

At The News offices, where dozens of slouched and chubby godinez excreted the greasy remains of their spicy lunches every day, there wasn’t even a plastic bag in the overflowing trash can next to the toilet. In the heat of the afternoon, the smell seeped around the bathroom door and into the forest of cubicles, lending the fifth-floor dungeon-ish office an air of a nursery or daycare full of dirty diapers and stinky kids. Trash bags full of soggy paper and excrement piled up in the streets, degrading in the rain and baking in the sun, until the wind picked up the dust causing a phenomenon known as fecal snow. At Lieja 33, despite signs printed on office paper warning against flushing anything down the toilet, I could never grow accustomed to collecting my used toilet paper and would always throw it into the bowl out of habit. Truthfully, I didn’t make much effort to assimilate to this particular cultural nuance, without knowing the cost of my hygienic selfishness. So it all went down the drain and out of mind, but with the arrival of the monsoon rains and mosquitos, and when the swamp upon which the city was built arose like a specter from it’s grave to retake the bountiful valley, the patio outside my little window overlooking the small courtyard began to fill with dirty water. Slowly at first, the water rose as the drain failed to fend off the deluge. Then, with a great gassy belch, wads of stained toilet paper began to bubble up to the surface of the grey pond. A few soggy wads bobbed in the rain — one, two, three little love notes from the swamp — before the drain gurgled and threw forth an eruption of putrid brown sewage and wet paper in a soup of acidic curses. The rain poured down and Tlaloc’s revenge sprang up with uncanny force. Oh, if Moctezuma could see us now. Mack, the diabolical hunch-backed caretaker, emerged with a flask in one hand and a wooden broom handle in the other, attempted to stop the attack from below.

“Noooooooo, basta!”

He yelled drunkenly, stabbing the stick into the sludge and teetering back and forth from foot to foot as the liquid approached the level of his knees.

“Pinche Gringo culero de la verga, pendejo, puto, chinga su madre, Gringo!”

He cursed me, waggling the pole at my window, from which I watched the drama in the shadows, smoking and exhaling the thick yellowish smoke out of my nose from just within the limits of the crumbling concrete where Mack couldn’t see me and the rain wouldn’t get me wet.

“No, no, no, no, no!”

Mack let out a strangled scream as he lost his footing and the flask flew out of his hand. In the arc of a rainbow, the little bottle of liquor drew a perfect parabola through the air, spewing it’s clear contents into the drizzling rain, twirling acrobatically and glittering in the dim light of the waning afternoon. The little bottle dove directly into the middle of the poopy pool, into the drain from which sprang the hellish, sulfuric sludge. Mack, slipping and sliding, dove after the flask, lunging headlong into the chunky mixture. Just then, the drain made a tremendous sucking sound like a monolithic toilet and a whirlpool opened up where the bottle had disappeared. The decrepit old man, with gnarled joints and crazy eyes, searched for the flask frantically with both hands. But the underworld, the gravity of History, pulled him downward, and so he too was spun by the whirlpool’s circles, until, first his frantic hands, then his head, letting out a last gurgling curse, were sucked into the portal to the city’s underbelly of skeletons and ghosts. As his shoulders and waist were swallowed, his legs twirled in the air like a figure skater until disappearing in one last burp of methane from below, and I flicked the butt of my spliff into the calm pool. Later in the night, a group of two women and one man arrived at Lieja 33 with cameras and measuring instruments to assess the scene, followed by an entire team of techs who scrutinized the area until I got too bored or drunk to keep watching and left the window to get a little sleep before another press conference at the Palacio de Bellas Artes.

*****
The short winter’s day was nearly at its end. Arco Iris’s face and hair reflected the smoky red light which struck across the horizon like a hot blade wielded by a god. Oh, yes! The blood colored residues of radiation caught in the little unruly hairs around her face drove me into crazy ecstasy, looking at her across the peaks and valleys of white cotton bed sheets, lost in the miniature world that she and I reigned over. The world was my bed and contained all things possible in this and every dimension; every possible universe was forged from between her thighs and mine. That solstice was marked by evaporating puddles and the smell of wet bread. The earthquake shaped streets of Mexico City trembled and groaned, yawning away the heat from the sun into the mist rising like a curtain woven from the night. There were no stars or moon, even as the curtain of darkness enveloped the city. Just the blinking light from a single Soviet-era satellite drew a line through the blackness in a slow arc. Mexico City is the friend that you invite over to your house for a dinner party and they steal your shit. Arco Iris and I showed up late to the party, at the same time as two police on one motorcycle, which protested pitifully, and, from the other side of Avenida Baja California, a mariachi band wearing matching blue suits bursting at the buttons from their round bellies. The police slowly dismounted as a group of cholos with shaved heads tipping back cups of rum ran inside with the bottle, and the cops seemed to call for backup, hanging out looking uncomfortable.

“The party’s over there,” shouted the leader of the mariachi band, pointing the neck of his guitar toward the crowded entrance heroically.

“Don’t be an ass hole, pig,” he shot toward the cops, clicking the heels of his pointy shoes.

With a twiddling, upward-spiraling major 7th arpeggio from the violin’s bow, the whole band sprang into song in the doorway of the party just as twilight gave way to night and the soviet satellite dipped below the horizon with the last ray of sun. Winding our way through the police and the band, she held my right arm above the elbow. I loved showing up anywhere with her beside me. Passing the threshold of sound born from the happy strings of the mariachi band, the rhythm turned to drums and frantic singing, as an Afro-Cuban polyrhythm sprung up from the party. A tornado of bright bodies in bright silk patterns churned around a group of drummers squatting on the floor, and a woman with a bejeweled microphone, as big and brown as a chocolate whale, stamping her feet in a fit of dance at the nucleus of the mass. It was religious. Quite literally, these crazy dancers were kicking up magic from the earth in a rum induced trance, while the chocolate giantess, wrapped in contrasting blue and yellow floral patterns that flashed in the harsh neon light, sang out prayers and curses to the whooping and wheezing crowd. The air was thick with incense and sweaty alcohol fumes, surveyed by a ring of black saints and deities depicted in paintings, ranging from La Virgen de Guadalupe to Yemayá, the universal mother. From somewhere in the crowd, a gourd of muddy liquid was thrust toward me and I took a swig of the repugnant mix, handing the potion to Arco Iris who sipped from the gourd and then kissed me quickly with a little laugh, twirling into the crowd as the night dissolved into a blur of colors and brown bodies.









*****
Part two:



*****









One of the downstairs neighbors at Lieja 33 was a middle-aged American with a Hunter S. Thompson complex who remembered the glaciers near his childhood home in Alaska (before they melted into the sea and the great tundra fires after the thaw forever changed the weather in the Northern Hemisphere), long forgotten by everyone born since the decisive shift toward the end, or backward toward the beginning of time as some would-be philosophers said then, or buried beneath the fumes of memories mixed with grain alcohol in the few old people that still stuck around on this side of life — literally and figuratively made blind by the poison in their minds. He was obsessed with boxing and cock fighting, or any debauchery pumped full of alcohol and testosterone. It was all very homoerotic: the way his yellowing eyes fixated on the hulking forms of the boxers, and his halfway open mouth was nearly foaming as he screamed for whichever man he thought a more perfect specimen for violence, or whichever cock he thought had the craziest look in its eye and the prettiest feathers. There was one light-skinned guero fighter with a left hook and a red beard whom the old gringo fetishized especially. I swear, he drooled when the Irish-looking Mexican boy entered the ring, dancing around and slapping the big gloves together. The boxer jumped up on the ropes in the corner of the ring, lifting his hands above his head, already glistening with sweat or shiny with body oil. The old gringo lept to his feet with the excitement of a much younger man, spilling beer all over my shoes, when the boxer pointed his dumb looking glove toward the crowd.

“Kill that mother fucker!” screamed the gringo.

“Knock his head off!”

The boxer went by the professional name Cinnamon, Canelo, because of his red hair. Unlike other Mexican fighters who rose from the ashes of real-life hard neighborhoods like Mexico City’s Tepito, Canelo was a thoroughbred fresa 🍓 from Guadalajara, Jalisco. The capital of white Mexicans.

“Indio, Indio, Indio!” chanted the crowd as his opponent, a hulking brown mass of tattoos and scars, entered the ring.

“Canelo culero, Canelo culero, Canelo culero!”

The crowd in the opposite bleachers jeered. They were albañiles, day laborers, cooks or security guards, and they despised the entitled rich boy from the north.

The old gringo could hardly contain himself from the anger and thirst for blood. He produced a flask from the inside pocket of his grimy sports jacket and drained its contents in one big gulp, then ordered two beers for himself without offering me anything. As the first round of the fight started, one beer was gone before the first punch was landed. From our perspective in the crowd, Indio seemed to tower over Canelo, but the pale skinned red haired out-of-towner was fast. I already cared so little about who won the fight — the brown man or the white man, a cyclical and repugnant war between races and cultures that echoed through time — but I wanted to care even less. I wished both boxers would knock each other out at the same time and that blood would erupt from their eyes and ears as they both twitched in the last throws of life, a real gladiator scene. I was bored within minutes, while the gringo screamed like a madman and inhaled alcohol like a sponge. The next time I saw the old man, he opened the door in his stained bathrobe as I made my way down the crooked central stairwell, and boy of no more than 15 slunk away from within the dank shadows of the apartment. They both seemed shy and embarrassed when they saw me, but I didn’t think much of it because I was on my way to meet Arco Iris for a carajillo near Plaza Rio de Janeiro, where she liked to feed a pack of feral cats cans of tuna. The boy stuffed something in his front pocket and picked between his teeth. Later, after Arco Iris was already gone, I saw the same boy on the street perpendicular to Lieja 33, Hamburgo (at first I thought they were drug dealers) waiting for a sports car or an SUV to roll down a window and offer a wad of wrinkled cash in exchange for a blowjob full of shame. Some of them weren’t such cowards and took the boys to clubs in the nearby Zona Rosa, at least offering them a drink before forcing a fat hairy hand down their skinny jeans and drooling over their childish bodies, like the gringo drooled over the cinnamon boxer.

*****
The only thing I feared more than being a failed artist was losing Arco Iris. I fantasized about being interviewed for a story about my painting to be published in Art Viewer or Art in America. Instead of painting, maybe in the shower or while smoking near the window in my little studio, I would imagine answers to the journalist’s questions that fully expressed the meaning behind the abstracted representations of plural realities that I was going for on my canvases, like a wheezy surrealist blinded by idealism. I imagined that there would be a photo of me at the top of the article in a beautiful, royal blue suit lined with red silk, and some really special socks. I knew that any artist worth a precious gallery space had to have special socks and fine leather shoes. Yuck, how queasy my wannabe eccentricism makes me remembering it now. And I imagined arriving an hour late (in my fantasy we couldn’t resist but to make love one more time after she’d already done her makeup) to the opening party for my big show in a black suburban SUV and opening the door for Arco Iris, giving her my hand as she stepped down from the car for all of the bourgeoisie to see in her new dress that I bought her with my advance money from the gallery. I’m making myself sick thinking about what an idealist dick I was. But then I was in my little studio in Mexico City’s Centro Historico, as insignificant as a mosquito, wanting to turn into my inner world and disappear. In my failure to materialize anything more than mediocre paintings, Arco Iris provided the refuge of fantasy. I could believe that everything was going to be okay, even as the fog of toxic smoke grew thicker and more red in the twilight, as long as I had her. I could be mediocre to all the world, but if she loved me I was a king.

I looked at Arco Iris like a flower opening its petals and turning its face into the sun, tracing the path of the radiant light that is also food across the sky. Though, for all my flowery language, I was no photosynthesizer, so looking at the sun would burn a hole in my cornea. But she bore a hole into my spirit and my soul with her eyes that burned me like suns. In this metaphor I was like the moon crossing paths ever so briefly with the cosmic super-powered energy of the sun for a moment during a total eclipse. For just a few unbearably magical seconds, the sun and the moon embrace, the smaller pock-marked space rock sliding over the blinding light and canceling out the radiation, which can’t help but to flare out around it’s intergalactic lover, like Arco Iris’s flower of light during orgasm. As soon as it had begun it was over. Arco Iris burned there at the center of the solar system, while the earth revolved around her and I, the moon, had no choice but to be pulled by gravity around my humble rock of green and blue, losing sight of the sun that I loved so dearly below the horizon of earth. I was but a humble moon! One of many such dependant and pathetic satellites in our galaxy. How could I possibly hoard all the sunlight for myself? I was destined to slavery and mediocrity, revolving forever around this poisonous speck in the cosmos, while she would grow and expand until her energy was too awesome for the fragile fabric of the universe to handle her weight, and she would implode into a black hole. I could only hope that in a few billion years I would be sucked into her innermost blackness.

*****
We woke very slowly, with the sound of the beach crashing through the mosquito screen. The sun set over the waves like a blood orange bisecting the horizon and burned in Arco Iris’s golden eyes. A translucent gecko snoozing on the window screen began to slowly bob its head as we woke from our naked siesta. From where I lay, with one hand curled around her slender neck and collarbone, the twilight contrasted her naked hips and back into a landscape framed by the black rectangle of the window, where a row of palm trees cut across the backdrop. The intense contrast cast by the fire on the horizon between the burning sun and the dark room creating the illusion that the whole scene was printed in 2D.

Oh, wait. No! Fuck. It was all a dream. The sounds of the beach faded away into the noise of traffic and helicopters echoing off wet bricks, and I was more alone than ever. The half pill of ecstasy I ate at the party was messing with my mind as I drifted in and out of a dreamstate. A mosquito’s high-pitched squeal broke through the waves of traffic as I tried desperately to fall back into the dream, to be with her for a few more minutes. Anywhere but in my nearly empty apartment at Lieja 33, on my bed of foam and cotton mats sweating into the muggy blue light of early morning. I reached for Arco Iris still trying my best to bundle her up into my arms as the image of the fiery sun in her eyes and the blond little hairs on the small of her back dissolved into a pile of stained sheets that I gathered into my chest like empty skin. The mosquito buzzed around my head like a kamikaze jet, but I didn’t want to open my eyes and face the yellow room with peeling paint. Oh, that sun looked so good, like honey, falling across the tan line left by her bikini. I wanted to lick that sunlight up, leaving goosebumps behind my tongue, tracing the path of the sun up her spine. But my memory was shit. Especially in that moment between asleep and awake while I clenched my jaw from the X. As soon as I opened my eyes, the dream was gone and the only thing left was the absence of Arco Iris, which filled the apartment with dusty timestamps where her menstrual blood left a rorschach blot on my sheets; in the bathroom tile grout where I still found her hairs, in the pair of lacy panties that I stole from the bag of clothes she left at my apartment after it was over. The sweet memories crumbled into ashes as I reached for them, and I saw only bitterness and decay in the yellow walls, as I searched the flaky ceiling and the dusty lamp for a reason to get out of bed and face the weight of nothingness. My apartment was mostly empty except for my bed and a plastic table with a tropical themed table cloth. Still, we built a world of our own from the ruins of the crumbling building and what remained of my belongings, eating in bed off of my only two plates. Those salsa stains were in my only pair of sheets too. But Arco Iris took any warmth that remained there with her to the world of my misery. With as much self loathing as any one person can muster, I remembered one of our last arguments ending in sloppy sex after we were both too exhausted from fighting to continue the sisyphean self flagellation. I couldn’t keep up my hardon and I came, halfway flaccid inside of her, before she had an orgasm. She was furious and I was emasculated by her hateful horniness.

"Pinche gringo, make me cum!"

I finally slapped the mosquito against the wall and it exploded into a red splash of my own blood.

*****
Because of everything, we’d been drinking more when the earthquakes started. The first rumble from beneath Lieja 33 hit at around midnight on a winter’s day when the light of the moon was hidden by a thick blanket of clouds, while I was lonely, smoking a spliff in the dim yellow light and silence full of city murmurs in my apartment. The first tremble was minor and I thought it was a truck passing or the metro slithering underneath, normal things that move the streets in the megalopolis jungle of snaking wires and creeping vines. But the second shock hit with a force that launched me to my feet. Lieja 33 swayed and twisted as if it were made of paper as I stumbled out the front door, thrown back and forth by the ground that seemed to turn to liquid. Suddenly, I was shirtless and shoeless in the street with my neighbors, the old gringo and the Argentinian whore. The old man was in his pajamas and socks, drink in hand, while she was just starting her day in full makeup and a short sequin dress the color of sapphire. The odd couple embraced tenderly. The angry earth settled with a crunching sound and strange lights exploded into the clouds above. The sound of glass raining down on the concrete made a strangely beautiful jazz song in the split second of silence between when the earth stopped jumping and the city exploded in cacophony of sirens and screaming. Electricity and internet service went out across the whole city, we couldn’t see a damn thing. I smoked by candlelight until the sun came up to reveal evil looking cracks slashing through the paint in my apartment. Plumes of orange dust rose into the sunrise against the morning sky where buildings had collapsed. Still with no water or light, there was nothing to do except take to the streets or be overcome by restlessness. With the first light of day even more buildings collapsed as if it were the weight of the sunlight itself that finally overwhelmed the crumbling bricks and twisting metal. A week later the smell of the dead beginning to decompose under the rubble would pounce you unsuspectingly, even before coming upon the gaping wound in the city, where an apartment block or a school used to bustle with children and grumpy old women leaning out of windows scowling at the street below. But then we got used to the earthquakes too, like everything else that was previously unbearable, proving to ourselves again and again that to be human is to be adaptable.

Don’t think for a second that I forgot about the sinkholes either. That winter, as if the underworld was literally sucking her into its fiery depths, whenever there was a good rain — one of those rains that soaked through concrete making the paint on the walls turn wet and jump back into the can — the streets of Mexico City would collapse into the abyss. A few holes would open up under some poor sucker stuck in traffic on his way home to Neza York, officially known as the Nezahualcóyotl slums. This city needs death, I think. Nothing has changed here since that sleazy Cortez came upon the inevitably doomed Moctezuma, another victim of this most mysterious and deep of valleys. At least Moctezuma and his crew knew that the volcanoes here needed a little human sacrifice to be kept at bay. During this auspicious ending, the city subsided on the dead prostitutes and stupid kids that were unlucky enough to get offed and tossed into one of the great canals of acidic black water that flow outward into the low farmlands in a futile attempt to keep the city from turning back into a lake. Or she would suck the guy stuck in traffic down into her web of blackness where the water waited to swallow him up and give his blood to the thirsty earth. !Que culera!

Then, as the volcanoes were beginning to simmer over with a spit and a sputter of lava, the highest forests of shrubbery started to smolder around the edges. Plumes of smoke from the burning tundra and steam from the volcanic glaciers being boiled by lava enveloped the city in a great curtain of smoke that rose straight up toward the heavens from the mountain tops, nearly blocking out the sun with it’s horrible redness. So, the Christmas lights that year made misty little orbs in the smog even at noon, and we all choked and drowned continually, and the feathery black ash fell in the little yellow living room at Lieja 33 while Arco Iris and I used our fingers and tongues to mine out every last photon of ecstasy from within the other.

*****
They had me paranoid, going crazy hasta la chingada, swimming through the chaos of the city between surreal press conferences about book fairs or new government programs, stuff I didn’t give any shit about. Therese oozed in at her leisure, or maybe just when she was feeling lonely, and plastered the walls with drippy sentimentalism, crooning and booing like a decrepit crow. She could be abusive and effusive in the same breath. Edgar Allan Poe couldn’t conceive of a more evil raven. She was an inconceivable specimen. It was unbelievable that the universe would transpire to produce such a specimen so pickled in bitterness and paranoia. Of course, the vinegar of life had taken its toll on poor Therese. In one of her famous stories, she was married to a fancy rich business guy in Texas, but, like most sleazy businessman, Therese’s dear husband blew all their money right up his nose! (Of course, her version was that he lost everything during the financial meltdown.) So, when things with Mr. Therese had gotten really bad and they were down to their last pennies, the hero couple humbly drove to the local goodwill begging for a meal in the family Ferrari. Oh, she wound that tale up with a tiny violin, as if they’d been so unlucky as to have to sell their second home on the beach.

Right when I was just about to light up a smoke during the ominous night, settling into the dirty red sofa, I felt the burning dagger dig into the soft flesh of my ass, and the yellow light wasn’t too good in my living room at Lieja 33, so when I first saw the black omen of death scuttle from beneath a cushion I couldn’t make out what the blur of movement in the shadows was hiding. I tore the couch apart in a fit, and saw it scuttle between the wall and one leg of the couch. Grasping my ass and hopping around like an escaped psychiatric patient, I spent an hour throwing over furniture and trying to capture the spindly culprit but finally ended up squishing its head with the rim of a jar. What I’m really saying is that Therese was like that scorpion who stung me in the ass in my own house.

All heroic like, I swaggered into the general manager’s office right as he was snorting up a big line of blow, swiping away the evidence and sniffling into his jacket so I wouldn’t see. I pretended not to notice. His face was pock marked with acne scars and screwed up with stress. His eyes were spider webs of bright red blood vessels. It looks like he’s never drank a glass of water in his life, I thought to myself.

“What can I do for you, guero,” he said, still rubbing his nose unconsciously, with one eye looking at me and another looking at his screen.

“Its bullshit man!” I practically shouted.

“That Therese is a goddamn banchy, she’s not chill, man! She’s a, a, an illiterate editor, man!”

He looked at me with both bulging red eyes.

“We both know she’s a psychopath, gringito, but I give a 10-meter dick (me vale diez metros de verga) about your problems with Therese,” he shot back at me, clearly aggravated.

“I should be getting paid more for this… at least!,” I pleaded now.

“We can’t do that. You can leave if you don’t want to be here,” he said, and just like that my leverage was gone, and I was helpless at this bloated coke-head’s mercy.

My attempt at Napoleon fell flat, I couldn’t conquer Russia with that weak performance. I'm afraid my memory here is flawed and maybe the truth is different than the way I remember: Arco Iris and I were at the peak of our infatuation (maybe it was closer to a one-sided illusion) and, as easily as she climaxed, my fire for her was hotter than a sun collapsing into itself in a supernova, like those brief moments right after orgasm where she turned into herself as if floating away having totally drained all the energy and fluid out of me, she floated away. Anyway, what I'm saying is that while I thought I was staging a coup at The News and wooing the prettiest princess, I was really making enemies of the people I relied on for my bread and confusing how Arco Iris tolerated my stupid fixation with her for love.

So I’ll tell you what I did in the middle of my self-destructive, poison-induced paranoia and wild love for Arco Iris that made me feel like a superhero when I wasn’t pale with nausea because of radiation or self disgust. Paco, the photographer, and I colluded against Therese in an act of pure evil, turning Therese’s own illicit tricks against her. She gave us the idea when she spied on her daughter via an Israeli phone tap. Paco was better positioned for the job since he was with her all day, following her around with his camera from embassy luncheons to embassy dinners while she treated him like a dog. It was only a matter of time until Therese said something incriminating enough to ruin her. We hid a recording device in the sweaty suit that she forced Paco to wear even though he couldn’t afford to get it dry cleaned. The very first day we had her on tape shouting about ragheads and lesbains. But of course our little act of heroism didn’t work — you know those bigwig media types, they just want to jerk off on camera and cum in each others hair. We delivered the tape to a rival media organization, Reforma newspaper, in an unmarked envelope with a USB drive and a letter. Without a second thought about righteousness, the executive editor at Reforma mailed the recordings straight to the big-nosed boss at The News in the same envelope, and the big scandal never came to pass after an agreeable cash exchange. Paco was quickly and unceremoniously fired while I was regulated to office duty until further notice, so I just melted inside the sweaty fish tank office sweating out alcohol and writing little love poems to Arco Iris. No, of course I won’t share one with you. Just imagine a particularly fruity vomit smell from too much wine — stuff about her being my Medici Venus and how green she made me.

*****
Outside the Chapultepec entrance to the metro station where I caught the bus to The News offices every day during my punishment, there was a sexless being begging for pesos in a song that transcended language to a general plea tone. The fluttering call emanated from a knot of cloth and bandages from which emerged a blackened hand and a plastic cup jiggling rhythmically with the pathetic call. The tip of its nose and fingers were eaten away and scabby from malignant syphilis. On the thing’s left calf a huge abscess oozed blood and pus. It sat in the middle of the stairs and the sea of people parted around the beggar like Moses at the Red Sea. Also like Moses, this bag of pus was more of a prophet than a beggar. In the afternoons, they would snooze after a lunch of whatever there had been to scrape from a trash can, dozing off, a mouse-sized cockroach munching on the leftovers of the torta del chavo or poking at the bloody bandages around the horrific abscess with its evil antenni. A perfect image of pathetic. But it was not so. Though the sea of chubby people with chaffed necks pretended not to see the all-seeing beggar — the best of them fidgeted for change and dropped a few pesos into the cup without looking at the prophet's face — behold, the decrepit and perishing one was really Moses himself, and Nezahualcóyotl too. You thought they would die or explode into a cloud of flesh-eating disease at the slightest gust of wind, but with glee and serenity this beggar jingled his cup and wailed into the air with a message, not a plea, a prophecy. They knew the end was nigh and revelled in the unwinding of everything. Even in the decomposition of their own body they found the joy of returning to earth and jingled the cup of change to make music not to beg for alms. Far from a Venus made of lifeless marble, they were God decomposing in the flesh.

Born to a prostitute, she wanted dearly to keep the wide-eyed baby, but her pimp made sure the little parasite was carted off to an orphanage in another delegation far away. The other side of Mexico City was the same as another universe for this poor girl who was forced into prostitution and knew the best thing for the child was to get out. At the orphanage, the chike was small and weak, and so was subject to the domination of meaner, stupider older boys who forced them to clean toilets with a toothbrush and stole their food. Well you can imagine what kind of girly-boy our little artist turned into. A monster. No one in their right mind would adopt such a scroungy volatile feline. Hopeful parents were scared off. So they were on the streets at 18, huffing gas from a sleeve a few months later. Nobody, not even themselves, ever gave them a name. No one ever knew they were an artist of prophecy. But through unimaginable suffering from the first moments of life, enlightenment, they never fought against reality as it was and so here ended in the metro singing as best the crippled body would let and jingling the pesos together, sleeping with the cockroaches and the rats.

*****
Emerging from the steamy metro snaking beneath the park, the wind was so cold that I could only look up for a split second to see where I was going before lowering my face into my hood. Little chunks of ice and airborne ash tore at my cheeks and lips like stinging bees in the squall that never ended. Even then I wasn’t sure how long it had been, but the grey snow was starting to make little banks where the concrete met brick. At least I was warmed by a flask of mezcal in the breast pocket of the big trench coat I wore to a party where I knew Arco Iris would show up, because she ran with that crowd. There wasn’t a single other person there that I cared about seeing, though I was equally terrified and electrified to possibly see her. It was the coldest it had ever been in the Federal District, but other places were living bigger more glowey-radioactive storms than the little bit of volcanic winter snow that had been turning everything grey as the sun faded ever dimmer in the thick clouds and ash overhead.

“I guess this really is it.” she said as we exited the red room into the entrance hall and the cold hit us.

“Yeah, I mean…” I tried to summon up some words.

“It’s okay though. I, I, just. Did you know Trotsky was murdered with an ice axe just over there?”

It was an assassination, technically. The Russians (as usual). Those comrades sure do have a history of killing. Funny, there was also quite a network of extramarital sex and espionage between the USSR and Mexico, though those ties were challenged by the crack of Trotsky’s skull as the ice axe pierced his brain. Squirt. Even funnier, David Alfonso Siqueiros — the famous socialist muralist of the revolution — was accused of leading the assaulting party that opened up on Trotsky’s brick house with Tommy guns. The attack allegedly lead by the muralist didn’t succeed in killing communism’s step dad but the ice axe did. It was assumed that the famous painter and high society snobster was a secret NKVD agent. I didn’t know what to believe though, I loved Siqueiros. He was my favorite of the wide-eyed muralists with delusions of utopia. People held onto that imaginary modernity that never existed up until the very end, but then it was just too cold and chemical for anyone to be so naive as to believe in utopia. Why do butterflies fly into the ice to die, as if they wish to be entombed forever? On the volcano Popocatepetl’s great glacier, where the lava met the ice in great plumes of steam, as the ice retreated ever further down the steep blue flanks of the towering cauldron and the lava oozed ever nearer to the city, butterflies frozen centuries past were reincarnated and flung high into the churning clouds so the ash that fell over everything like snow in hell was full of iridescent wings. Why did Trotsky’s assassin carry an ice axe, as if he was going to climb the volcano and escape the ghost of Stalin, even though he was born in Spain? His mother put him up to it.

*****
I was in my little studio in the Centro Historico, where the black and white tile floor was smeared with colors and drips and the occasional cigarette burn, when the windows were rattled by the shock of an explosion. The pressure wave arrived before the sound, so when the glass vibrated violently, I barely looked up from the canvas. But the sound of the explosion launched me to my feet in a twisting lurch only after tripping over the chair leg and sprawling out on the floor in a panic, and I stretched my head out of the building through the window to see a plume of smoke rising up from the Zocalo. A car had driven into the holiday crowd in front of the cathedral and the driver had set of a car bomb, which sent the facade of the church crumbling to the ground and limbs flying in great arcs of blood glistening in the sun like rockets. From beneath the wreckage where the car bomb had exploded, the earth dropped away in big chucks, revealing part of the great pyramid of Tenochtitlan and the skulls of other sacrifices — the buried curse had been broken with a drop of blood through the bricks of the Zocalo and onto the sacrificial stone of the Aztec empire. A churning and bubbling lake of lava sucked the engine, all that remained, of the car into the fiery depths then the screaming people alongwith with the lucky few who were already dead. The lava lapped up against the crumbling facade of the cathedral like the waves of history knocking on the door to set the record straight. As quickly as the dust and ash had settled back onto the bricks of the sidewalk, the chaos subsided but the the pit of bubbling lava remained like a bleeding wound in the heart of the city. Sheets of metal and plastic were secured across the fiery entrance to hell a few hours later and the crowds turned their heads away again. One of the victims killed in the bombing turned out to be a journalist from Malta who had leaked a trove of documents exposing the corrupt practices of her country's government officials establishing offshore accounts for warlords and Mexican drug cartel bosses, revealing that the prime minister was directly involved in selling passports through an intermediary in Azerbaijan. Such were the times, when any good deed or anarchism against the established underworld of quid pro quo deals in government or business meant death. Her fault though, she should have learned from Trotsky and other political dissidents who thought the chaos of the city would cloak them. But the streets had eyes.

You would assume that, at the end, love would be the salve for the collective suffering of a dying world. I knew objectively that the saddest of all heartbreaks was the normalization of so much blood and death, but the pieces of my heart broken by Arco Iris were even more raw than the blood on the steps of the cathedral dripping through the bricks onto the pyramid beneath. Though even then loving her as if there were no natural phenomenon as perfect turned out to be just as fraught as any relationship between cosmic bodies that inevitably must end. I always found a way to mess everything up and spoil any temporary vacation from the banal certainty of the finality toward which we were hurling. I obsessed over her as if she were a porcelain doll made from the powder of my own bones. And so, by fatal error of pathological infatuation and fantasy, I treated her like a child, my daughter, against every ounce of my own desire, for which she resented me endlessly. So, in the moments following the explosion, my mind went first to her though we hadn’t spoken in months and I knew she couldn’t have been there. Because she was in Buenos Aires or Barcelona, I don’t remember which one. On the fifth or sixth call she finally answered.

“Hi, what’s—”

“Are you okay?”

The phone shook violently in my hand.

“I’m fine. What’s going on?”

“I thought maybe you were hurt, I’m sorry, I—”

“What are you talking about?”

“The explosion. And Lava. The cathedral collapsed. I was so worried about you.”

I knew I wasn’t making any sense but continued unable to stop rambling pathetically.

“I’m sorry, but you’re fine, right? I need to see you. Things are getting so...” As I sputtered out and struggled for the words, she was silent on the other end of the line.

Finally she said, “Why did you call me?”

“I said I was worried. There was an explosion. The pyramid turned into a big pool of lava, there was blood every—”

“What the fuck are you talking about? I can’t. I have to go, I’m sorry. I’ll call you when I’m back.”

Beep.

*****
She was right, I was going crazy. Even while the world was unwinding no one seemed to turn their gaze up from their dirty shoes, they preferred to pretend that everything was alright, and I couldn’t blame them. I wished I could too. I wanted to do something stupid, just to feel alive, but we’d become so accustomed to the fact that death was on the horizon, beneath our feet, choking us from within so that any action seemed futile and stupid. Paralysis was the general attitude. I hardly even considered the impending ending, and didn’t much notice the ash falls becoming more frequent or the sunlight diffusing slowly into red making laser beams in the dust hanging in the air. Because I was so focused on the afternoon light in the little white hairs above Arco Iris’s upper lip. I thought there was a whole symphony there. Enough for a lifetime of masterpieces. And a few weeks later when we finally met for a coffee, I was getting lost in the little philtrum dimple up there above her lips while she was talking. As she spoke her words lifted the ash from the dying trees and made the world green again, shining light deep into my own heart where only despair and fear of the outside had since resided.

“Hi. Have you seen the sky?” she said, unwrapping her neck from a long greenish scarf and sitting across the table.

“It’s so weird, I think.”

“It is,” I said, trying not to look her in the eyes but definitely not looking at the sky, which was a deep red, casting a misty aura bouncing through the light around the silhouettes of buildings.

“Anyway, I wanted to tell you, I still feel the same. I don't want—”

“I know, you don’t have to say it again. It’s obvious from the way you are toward me, ” I said.

“I wish it wasn’t uncomfortable between us. I do care about you.”

Her eyes scanned the sky and the red light was reflected in the moistness of her eyes.

“Yes, well, c’est la vie. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Can we just enjoy our coffee?”

I’d made an impossible request — It was weak and tasteless Nescafé.

“Okay, fine…” she said, and after a long pause, “How are you?”

“Fine. Tired of this.”

I glanced around as if to indicate that I was tired of reality itself, tired of being a man and the smell of sulphur.

“God, don’t start. That’s your problem, you know. You’re always depressed and you’re such a childish savant that you think you’re the only one. Well, you’re not. Tell me, what would you change if you could? What would you do with more money? What would you do if I loved you?”

“Probably the same,” I admitted.

“You constantly judge others for trying to make their life tolerable — you’re such a nihilist. I think you suffer just because you’re so afraid of being mediocre that you refuse to be even a little bit happy as long as you’re nobody.”

She was right, of course. But I reveled in her anger. As long as I made her feel something I held power. I smiled, which I knew would annoy her.

“Yeah, well, I don’t want to feign happiness. I’m not going to pretend like everything is great when nothing is actually okay. Look around. Why does everyone think happiness is just something you pretend forever until you die in some totally unnecessary way? I know you know better. Why pretend like everything isn’t fucked?”

There was a long pause when neither of us spoke.

“People don’t want to be around someone who’s so negative. No wonder you’re lonely. You’re not even that good of a painter.”

She trailed off, looking at me searchingly, knowing that she’d said the most hurtful thing possible, as if she didn’t really mean it but wanted to say it for a long time.

And there it was, under the red canopy of ever diminishing light. I finally looked at her face.

“So what should we do?”

“Like you said, let’s enjoy our coffee,” said Arco Iris before Another long pause. There was a buzz in the distance.

“I’m ready to leave,” I said, feeling my heart break again.

A police drone appeared above the wilting trees, blending the diffused sunlight in its propellers. Straining against the weight of the situation, I struggled to my feet. The propellers kept chopping the air overhead but I pretended not to notice.

“Anyway, what’s the difference now? Let’s go.”

I had to raise my voice so she could hear me. The drone followed us as we started to make our way down the sidewalk without a destination or particular direction. I kicked brown leaves and thought about thrownness — Heidegger — what a stupid moment to let my mind wander to philosophy. I chuckled to myself, if only the stuffy academics of a time past would have saved us with their heddy and unreadable documents. Why didn’t they do anything? Of course all they could do was to debate among themselves about the minutiae of post-this and neo-that. Action could not be expected from the thinking class when the air conditioner broke let alone when the sky began to fall. I wanted to share my dark humor with Arco Iris, but I knew she wouldn’t appreciate the dig at scholarly knowledge, even if it had been proven irrevocably useless to stop the end of the world. After all, damned be the scientific method in the face of survival. It smoldered like wood that had been rained on or wet books burned for the revolutionary writings they whispered to extremists. Oh, you think burning books is bad? Wait until they start eating the books because they have no food. Grandmas thickened the porridge with damp pages, boiling the paper down into goo just to fool children's’ bellies into thinking they’d eaten. Ha! Remember hot water, my love?

*****
Inside Lieja 33, I heard sirens squeal by in full stereo, from my right ear to the left, as I sat at the plastic table staring out the open window. To my ears, it seemed that the sirens’ pitch changed from high to low as the ambulances and police cars wailed down the street. But the poor sucker with his guts hanging out inside the ambulance heard the unending drone as it really was. Trapped inside the noise, as was often the case when Lieja was clogged with traffic, the ambulances would get stuck in the slowly moving river of metal and gas — more like a glacier, it creeped along so slowly — and the stereo effect would get lost in the air along with the fumes and the dust. On an especially gruesome day, a woman riding her bike to work was run over by a bus just outside the building’s front door. I didn’t notice. I read about it later in the news. Not The News though, we would never report anything so terrible, so real. Only government approved news, please.

“I love you,” I wrote to Arco Iris in the middle of a sad, humid party.

“Things aren’t always as they seem,” she replied an hour later.

To call it a party is probably too generous. I was getting drunk with a group of wannabe punk artists who also, like me, felt generally pissed at not being famous, and so we directed their rage at pretending to be Marxists. But we were mostly too lazy or not sober enough to actually read anything (especially anything as dull as Marx!). You could hardly call this sorry bunch friends either. I knew that not a single one would leave their dingy apartment or lend me five pesos for the metro to save my life. But we always scraped together enough for a gram or two of extremely mediocre cocain — the kind that leaves baking soda residue in your nose the whole next day — and cheap beer. (Some of the more pompous kids who really played up the act of being an artist insisted on drinking wine, of course.) The feeling was mutual. It was an amorphous group that formed out of convenience, and we wailed and complained about our inconveniently bohemian lives like street cats locked in a bathroom, which happens to be a good metaphor for how I felt in general. If it sounds pathetic, trust me, it was. We worked up a righteous stink bitching like banshees about the system and neoliberalism. Neither of which we knew anything about. Most had never worked — I was the only one employed, which I held over them with great zeal and they, of course, resented me mightily because I was a sell out — and relied on handouts from parents or grandparents or sisters or lovers, whoever. One girl was discharged from the American marines for being just a little too far over the border of borderline personality disorder and got disability checks every month. To us she was unimaginably rich but we resented her too, for having exactly what we didn’t want to admit that we wanted. Right about the time whoever bought the coke started getting violent and paranoid that we were all trying to steal their shit, and the conversation digressed into an incomprehensible, criminally-uninformed shouting match about the political power of art, which made me positively queasy, someone announced that a little anarchy was in order. I was all for anything that interrupted the monotony of arguing with these horrible mortals I sometimes called my friends (only when Arco Iris said I didn’t have any). The sun was already coming up, so it was time to make moves no matter what, and we still had half a gram. So up our hungry noses it went. Imbued with the magical power of chemicals and minor poison, we struck out into the virgin morning. We sent a shiver down the spine of any office worker unlucky enough to cross our sordid path on their way to work. School children and housewives scurried to the other side of the street away from our bulging red eyes and chomping jowls. Oh, we were indeed a terrifying bunch of rabble rousers for the faint of heart or the healthy catholic who went about dying assured of their celestial place in paradise. Funny how a lack of belief makes one less likely to be saintly here on earth, even in the comfortable knowledge that life on this humble rock is all there will ever be. What I’m saying is that no one would have mistaken any one of us for a saint. The only plan was rebellion and, as highfalutin artists, the only man we knew to stick it to was the museum. Politics or anything more tangible was entirely off our radar because the suffering of art was our mission and our desire. The blueish light of dawn giving way to daybreak found us on the steps of the Palacio de Bellas Artes. We were all fancied ourselves at least minor league criminals, so the lock on the front door should have been quick work. But in our compromised state the simple task proved more than our abilities and it was only a minute or two before someone threw a brick through the window. Hugo, who was huge and awkward jumped through the broken glass heroically and with the most subversive intentions, but the glass gashed him across the abdomen as if he were Sir Lancelot. Blood sprang forth from the wound like a fountain, though the hero was too subconscious to notice, and a trail of scarlet red led us forth toward victory. To an outsider we probably looked not like monsters as I imagined, even less like the heroes we felt like, and mostly like cockroaches. Scum, surely. Proudly. By then, amid all the bleakness descending on the city in a heavy sulphuric, suffocating fog, no one paid us half as second of attention anyway. The museum was closed, probably forever. What good were museums now? All the promises of knowledge once contained within were now dissolved into sorrow, or worse, forgotten for good. The idealism of the murals was no more; just something to be scoffed at and ridiculed because finality was so certain and objective. So we whiped out our flacid penisis and pissed all over the great canvases by Siqueiros, Orozco and Rivera. Not because they were irrelevant, because we were. Getting drenched in urine rife with drugs and alcohol was our homage to the muralists and our envy at their one-time fame. How we longed to be forgotten like the Mexican Muralists and their utopian visions echoing through history in empty halls full of dust and books never to be read again! They had a good run, at least. We would never even have the honor be forgotten because we would never make even the slightest mark, not even a footnote, on textbooks or even cheap magazines other than to wipe our asses once toilet paper ran out everywhere. How could we make our mark on history when history was no more? Forgotten like the muralists. Not even forgotten. What a ridiculous endeavour to be an artist at the end of the world. Bladders empty and all the drugs gone, it wasn’t long before our energy was spent and we fell exhausted on the grimy marble floors of the palace where time stood still, and the red sun peered in through the windows cutting through the dusty darkness with rectangular beams as we snoozed. Of course, I dreamed of, you know, the girl whose lips held back pure light, Arco Iris, and we were in a field of flowers, real flowers. Then, with a kick to the ribs, I was woken by a pair of dirty black boots and navy pants. The police had come after all. Someone did notice our political action, the protest against our own irrelevance. Law enforcement was the least of these pigs concern. They didn’t beat around the bush.

“Give us all the money you have,” said one cop, apparently the leader because he had a different slightly more ridiculous hat than the others.

The joke was on him! Together we barely managed to scrape together 100 pesos in change. They kicked and beat us with their sticks but we only laughed, happy to feel something, even the sharp pain of wood on bone and the smell of my own blood made me feel alive at last. We woke up all crammed into a cell at the municipal police headquarters where we slept off our hangovers until the cell door clanged open. Two officers and a detective peered in at us, stinking of piss and grime, without saying a word. Carlos and Jose were separated and raped repeatedly. After the police released us into the orange and dusty dusk, we never saw either of them again, but still heard their cries echoing of the sweaty walls.

*****
In the densely overpopulated and trash infested, though unbelievably magical and labyrinthine, barrio of Merced, which was swallowed by a monstrous amorphous market where the passages shifted as soon as you turned your back and the vendors communicated in lost dialects, I was wondering, lost, without looking for anything in particular. Probably looking for Arco Iris. You could buy anything imaginable and many things beyond the limits of your naive imagination. Human organs. Behind hidden doors off the sides of the main passageways, brothels extended into magical space, which shouldn’t exist according to the laws of physics, but there they were, full of flickering fluorescent lights and decades of sticky sex fluids, and always a trembling old policeman who was so corrupt even his teeth were crooked. Beware, lest you stumble unexpectedly into one of these biblical brothels in search of a place to pee and end up fucked half to death by a flavorful trans girl and wake up in a bathtub full of ice with a six inch incision in your abdomen and one less kidney.

I was deep inside and lost, and lost inside. Though there was no outside here, just within and without. I tried to keep a low profile and look tough. So I carried nothing but a few pesos and wore a black tank-top to show my tattoos. But I still stuck out a whole head above the masses of brown bodies.

“¿Que buscas, Guero?” asked a vendor on my left.

Then the same on the right.

“¿Que buscas, Guero?”

I’d been made. Paranoid now, I stole down a short slit between two vegetable stands into the next passageway. Every stall was packed with towering walls of shoes now, a footwear canyon as far as I could see. I could hear the squeaky rubber of their cheap Chinese soles, quietly at first, and then it was overwhelming, as if the counterfeit Nikes and Reeboks were taunting me. So I made off down the next line of stalls only to be confronted by the nauseating stench of chicken beginning to rot in the humid air of the marketplace. Whole chickens, alive and dead chickens cut into every imaginable piece, down to their fried little reptile feet smothered with hot sauce, stretched out in front of me in an endless, grotesque parade of decay and death. The next passage revealed an endless row of papier-mâché masks and party favors. Then countless stands of tacos and tortas and chicharrón. Every time I stumbled toward a ray of sunlight at the end of one row of overcrowded stalls, it turned out to be an illusion hiding another endless quotidian maze. Growing more desperate and paranoid with every passing vendor.

“¿Que quieres, Guero?”

I saw a man looking at me from just behind a stall of childrens’ toys. Then I saw him a few minutes later lurking behind a butcher’s table stacked high with newly bled goats. Again, as I began to panic, scanning the horizon for a way out of the market closing in on me like a Chinese finger trap, I caught him watching me through a curtain of hanging rattlesnake skins, coyote furs and incense smoke. Nearly running, at a half gallop, I saw a light far off and, to my relief, the sun shined brighter as I got closer, and I could see the rays of light cutting into the magical realm of the marketplace, creating a portal by which I could finally escape.

Freedom, at last! I squeezed out the little doorway at full speed and plopped into a busy sidewalk where every walker by was unaware of the evil world that existed just behind the thin curtain of light. Panting hard, no one noticed me either, even if I may have literally materialized into thin air. I caught my breath, leaning up against a wall of dirty yellow tile. I was safe. Traffic lurched by for a few minutes. A barrio style limousine made from two chopped up and rusty VW Bugs made a right hand turn from my left on the corner where I steadied myself against the wall. As the awkward car worked to make the tight turn, the passenger looked right at me and he was wearing a colorful clown mask. The whole car was full of clowns and they all stared me up and down menacingly, curiously, as the ridiculous limo slowly pulled away through traffic. But then I felt a sharp pain in the side of my neck like a bee sting and I whirled around to see his horrible face, smiling, and my hand found a syringe protruding from just above my collarbone. It was them. Everything dimmed by about 50 percent, even the busy sounds of the street and its people. Fading quickly I stumbled, dragging my limbs forward and into the street where traffic was stopped now. The world faded away to 20 percent now and I felt like I was observing my life through a small screen, just too far away to make out the details. Without thinking, I fell against the first car and, opening the door, while at the same time using it to support my weight, I collapsed into the laps of a family with terror painted on their faces.

“Help,” I managed to say weakly.

My vision went in and out like still frames of a grainy old film.

“Take me to a hospital, please. Por favor, ayudame.”

*****
The front page of The News said the BMW was going over 200 kilometers an hour when he died. It was around the same time that I started visiting the most salacious corners of La Merced regularly, paying different girls who vaguely reminded me of Arco Iris, or seemed like her antithesis, for sex in a cheap hourly hotel. There was one girl who I liked especially, Starshine, with an impressive bush of pubic hair and pyramid shaped pink nipples. I felt even more sad, especially after the sex was done and the soberness of empty balls filled my head with shame. But she was always playful and made it seem less transactional than it felt with other girls in the market. I knew that Paco didn’t have a car, let alone a BMW, so when I saw it on the front page of The News, I knew it couldn’t be true. They said he’d driven a group of friends home from a party suspiciously close to the newspaper’s offices in the outer edges of the city, and that he was under the influence of alcohol and cocaine when he crashed into a light pole where Avenida Reforma turns toward the center of the city near the entrance of the park, barely a block from Lieja 33.

“He Lost His Head: Teen Party-goers Decapitated in Drunk Driving Accident,” read the headline.

A viral video from a civilian who came across the scene showed body parts strewn around, a mangled head and puddles of blood among twisted metal. Legs were twisted at unnatural angles away from their bodies, with bones and organs sticking out. (Death is so obvious even when the body remains mostly intact, as if you can see at first glance that there’s no longer a spirit in the vessel.) The car had been ripped to pieces, literally cut in half by the pole as the vehicle took flight off the street curb. Paco was made out to be a drug addict and murderer. The reporter said that he was a nobody, a ni-ni, with no job and no loved ones, who prayed on young girls at teenage parties. There were four dead in total, all horribly mangled in the wreckage, including Paco. Mexico is full of death. So the news of the graphic crash faded off the front page quickly and into the city pages, with rumors about a fifth passenger that police never found. I could smell the lies in the ink of the newspapers that piled my desk at The News. It had to be them. I braced for what would come next. But I didn’t care much about dying or being tortured. I was already in the throws of the worst torture without Arco Iris, and even they had to feel apathetic about the futility of drawing blood for revenge in the face of everlasting nothingness. Everything was already fading away in our minds. As if we never existed, and the universe will swirl on without us just the same.

*****
“I think it would mean something different for you than it would for me,” she wrote.

“I don’t understand. What would it mean?”

“Well, nothing really. That you came to visit me. Which would be great if there were no strings attached. I guess the bottom line is that, although I love you, I don't imagine us together anytime soon without extraordinary circumstances transpiring to bring us together.”

*****
Waiting for it to be over, passing time trying not to let time pass, was like waiting for test results from the free sex clinic after a particularly salacious night that turned into a difficult morning. “If I lived anywhere in the world except Europe, it would be Mexico City,” Luc Tuymans told me.

“It takes three hours to drive from one end to the other.”

I’m not sure it can even be done. A thick stack of cash sat on the shallow bar of the strip club where a friend afflicted with the disease of identifying as a poet invited me to meet the infamous painter. I leaned in to hear what he was saying.

“You’re good, I see it, a real artist,” he slurred after a few whisky’n’cokes.

“So few real artists left. No one has balls anymore!” He said the same thing to every young wannabe. Tuymans was god to me, pontificating loudly that his first painting show was exhibited in a swimming pool

“The white cube was so oppressive!”

The girls hardly paid any attention to me, something surprising at the time in my naivety considering the considerable age difference between myself and Tuymans. I was certainly no dashing knight. But the famous painter’s face was bloated by alcoholism and his cheeks and neck scruff sagged with the greasy weight of his considerable body. Still, the women danced around me with apathetic half passion, while Tuymans tucked wads of cash into their stringy thongs and bras, which then happily climbed up their mountainous breasts and dropped into the piles of money. Oh, did he just stick a roll of bills in her — ? It was the best night of my life. Until I met Arco Iris.

I was hoping we would have more time together, but I can feel it coming as if it were a spector lurking just outside the window, barely beyond the threshold of the entranceway to Lieja 33, death breathing sulfur draped in ashy robes of coal and butterfly wings. I thought I would have more time to say it the way I wanted. But I’ll tell you the exact moment I fell in love with Arco Iris. We were in the metro, maybe around midnight because it was just her and I, a group of young Mexican guys wearing knock-off designer brands and watches, and a skinny woman, oh, wait, a trans woman in a tight green dress and maroon stalkings. Her dress and shoes were also counterfeit luxury items, like some pop music video taking place in a backward and dark dimension. Though I hardly noticed the young men bristling with testosterone, looking sideways at her ass and roughhousing, or the sparkling green dress and long blond wig because all I saw was Arco Iris. Love took me next, when the young men started shouting across the train at the trans women sitting alone looking at her phone.

“What is that?!” shouted one of them, shoving his friend up against that metal wall of the traincar.

“Guey, that shit is nasty. Go over there and get its number.”

They all screamed and giggled like little boys, pushing each other and holding on to an arm or leaning in close a split second longer than required by play, clearly aroused and curious about their own bodies and the body of the helpless, in between person across the train. Alas, these boys grew up here in this time, where exploring each others’ orifices, no matter how innocent, is stigmatized and frowned upon more than being sexually violent and predatory. So rather than caress the other boys’ tight glutes with curious fingertips, they barked like bitches just across the train car from us, getting all worked up to beat the innocent woman to death. They were foaming at the mouth for each others’ cocks, though unfortunately discapacitated from acting upon those desires and thus at the point of succumbing to the bloodlust of killing that which they secretly desired to become — a woman with a penis. As the pent up testosterone and repressed lust threatened to boil over into real bloodshed, Arco Iris uttered

“Paris?” and walked to the other end of the wagon where the woman sat apparently oblivious to the incipient danger or at least indifferent to the precarious reality of being.

I followed Arco Iris who embraced the woman, Paris, whose face lit up with a smile as she recognized a familiar face. Putting her body in between the ravid teenagers and the vulnerable person, Arco Iris said nothing of the threatened violence, instead telling the girl,

“You look amazing tonight. I hope you’re going somewhere fun.”

It seemed obvious to me that Arco Iris saved that pretty girl’s life. She didn’t think twice about it. One of the brown boys at the other end of the train car sparked up a blunt, filling the whole place up with spicy pot smoke, the white flag. It’s cheesy and awful, but that’s when and where I fell in love with the rainbow.

After the first time we made love, the words “I love you” were barely held back by my tongue. The effort of not saying it took every ounce of energy. I felt like I was constantly gagging on those words, heavy as lead. So when she, while I was inside her with one hand on a breast and the other behind her left knee spreading her legs open, cumming, said it first — I love you — I panicked. Had I heard right? Did she mean something else? By the time I recovered from the initial impact of those precious and fragile words, it was too late. It was too late for everything. Too late to tell her now. I went flacid and withered into the bed beside her, trembling a little as she fell asleep indifferent to the battle raging inside my wild mind. I was ready to set myself on fire. Better yet, to dive head first into a pool of liquid nitrogen so that the moment she said those words would be frozen in time.

“I love you, Arco Iris,” I said. She opened her eyes slightly and just looked at me with a slightly sad, apathetic expression. The seconds passed like thunder rolling between her naked body and mine. I said it again, the familiar feeling of desperation creeping up my throat from my stomach. “I love you.” She turned away toward the little window in my bedroom where the light poured through the ashy dust hanginging in the sweaty air creating a red rectangular hologram in the dim room, which fell across her feet hanging off the foam and cotton matts upon which we were in repose. How could she love me? A pathetic painter. A wannabe who drank and smoked more than put brush to paper, who didn’t even have a real bed on which to copulate. And yet, she had said it. I was sure, even while I still didn’t believe it was real life. Even before I ever laid eyes on the perfectness of her form, before I was hypnotized by those dewey lips, the impending doom of our final days were already on the horizon. We were just blind. Accustomed to mediocrity and used to turning the other cheek to avert our gaze from any suffering or lesser thing, like the beggar outside of the subway who actually turned out to be Jesus and Muhammad and Quetzalcoatl. While white couples in the suburbs walked their dogs, carrying around bags of poop in the pockets of their sweatpants, the End creeped up from beyond the horizon. But Arco Iris glowed even brighter than all the radiation in the clouds and all the LEDs in Mexico City. The real end of everything, even love. No matter how many times I said it. “I love you.” Arco Iris never said it back, but just looked at me with the same expression of fleeting warmth and melancholy which she had given me on that first night lying on my dirty bed smelling of our bodies and smoke, and the orange-red light from the window burned in her eyes.

*****
*****



















Annex:

Sacred Mole from the Convent of Santa Rosa de Lima

It’s commonly known and often cited that the indigenous people of Mexico ate chocolate as an aphrodisiac, and, it’s said, during colonization the nuns too would eat their own chocolate sauce over hunks of wild turkey, fatty juices dripping down their white gowns and virginal bodies, happy without men, happy with their sisters and their maza, closer to god, to Nezahualcoyotl. Mole Poblano is the most complex mole in Mexico, where there are hundreds of versions of the basic chocolate and chile sauce. The nuns behind the walls and alters at the Convent of Santa Rosa de Lima had time on their hands and an enlightened sense of beauty, so their chocolate sauce included two dozen separate ingredients and required three full days to make. The recipe is still cooked using traditional hot charcoal and clay pots — no electricity or gas — and calls for a gallina vieja or an old chicken to be boiled in the second stage of the sauce for an entire day. The chicken, passed the age at which it is tender to eat, adds flavor to the sauce without becoming gelatinous like a younger hen. All ingredients that call for it are fried in manteca or pork lard. The texture added by animal crackers that are now used throughout Mexico to make all different types of mole would have originally been created using old bread.

1.) Ingredients:

2.) Chipotle Meco, 50g (fried)

3.) Chile Pasilla, 100g (blackened and boiled)

4.) Chile Mulato, 50g (blackened and boiled)

5.) Small plantain (fried)

6.) Raw peanuts, 100g (fried)

7.) Almonds, 50g (fried)

8.) Walnuts, 50g (fried)

9.) Sesame seeds, 250g (toasted)

10.) Raisins, 250g (fried and boiled)

11.) Animal crackers, 100g (fried)

12.) Garlic, 2 large cloves (blackened)

13.) Cinnamon, 1 stick (crumbled)

14.) Half onion (grilled)

15.) Anis, 1 pinch (fried)

16.) One clove

17.) One pinch of black pepper

18.) Four corn tortillas (very burned)

19.) One bar of Tres Coronas or Abuelita brand chocolate

20.) One bar of dark chocolate from Oaxaca

21.) Manteca/lard, 1 liter

22.) Gallina vieja (chicken that is too old to eat)

23.) Salt to taste

Though our mole is made up of a complex array of flavors, from sweet to bitter burned, to savory and spicy, the sesame seeds and chiles are where it all begins. Start with 250 grams of the small white seeds tossed all at once into a hot cast-iron pan. Over high heat, without adding oil, move the seeds around constantly until their color starts to change from light to golden. Be careful not to let the seeds rest so as not to blacken or burn any part of the seeds and so that all 250 grams of them are evenly cooked. Set the sesame seeds to the side in a ceramic or glass bowl.

Select the freshest Chile Pasilla and Chile Mulato possible. Their aroma should be pungent and spicy but still slightly fruity, and the cook should be able to tell the difference between the two by smell (not because they are an expert in the variety of chiles but because each has a distinct aroma, which is lost over time as they dry). The seeds should be removed from each chile carefully, using gloves and being wary of touching eyes or genitalia soon after handling the chiles.

Put a large (at least 5 gallon) pot of water on heat to boil. In the same very hot pan over charcoal, still with no oil, lay the chiles flat without overlapping and char both sides evenly. When the chiles begin to smoke significantly, remove them from the heat and dunk them in a pot of nearly boiling water. Be careful not to inhale the smoke, as it will burn the throat and eyes. For the same reason, I suggest that this recipe be cooked outdoors or in an industrial kitchen.

Meanwhile, while grilling the chiles, seperate a bowl or small pot of hot water. When all the chiles have blackened and have been placed in the hot bath, let them soak and rest for 12 to 18 hours. Soak the almonds for 20 mins inside the separate bowl or pot of unsalted water, peeling their skin once it has softened enough to be removed by hand. Set the almonds aside.

Next, using the same hot cast-iron with no oil, it’s time to give the mole its black color. Any old tortilla will do, but I suggest that it be a special tortilla: A tortilla of maza azul from the side of the mountain, La Malinche, the traitor. Or a leftover tortilla that your grandma made, or even your favorite street taco tortilla. Any tortilla will do, but please don’t make it a tortilla made with techno-corn grown north of the border wall. That would ruin everything. Not a special tortilla, but at the very least a real tortilla, maybe. A tortilla made from one of the 300 varieties of corn native to Mexico, that’s enough to please the gods. Make it a few days old, even. So that it’s not totally dried out or rancid, but not as delicate as when fresh of the comal. Any tortilla, really.

Burn it. Burn four tortillas until they’re entirely black, keeping them from erupting in flames or crumbling into charcoal. The tortillas should remain intact, burnt everywhere on all sides but still with maza in the middle. Set the burned tortillas aside. Use the hot pan to blacken the outside of the half onion and the garlic. Take the pan off the heat and set it aside. Prepare a large five gallon hand-made, traditional clay pot.

Ready your fire. Add charcoal so that the heat is high enough to fry in the large clay pot. Once all the charcoal is lit and the heat is sufficient, set the large pot over the coals. Now it’s time to have fun with pig fat. Scoop several generous tablespoons of lard into the hot pan and let the pot sit until the lard is about an inch deep and hot enough to fry. Begin by frying the Chipotle Meco chile in the lard until they puff up slightly and turn golden brown. Set the fried chile’s aside in a large bowl. Next, fry the plantain in medium slices. The manteca should be hot enough to cook the chile and banana in minutes. Taking care to fry the chiles and the plantain slices separately, cooking both evenly, add the plantain to the bowl with the fried chiles. Next, adding several tablespoons of lard, fry the animal crackers until dark brown, be careful not to let them burn. The cookies will absorb a lot of fat, which will add richness and texture to the mole. Add the fried animal crackers to the Chipotle Meco and plantain bowl.

With the lard that’s left in the large red clay pot after frying the animal crackers, fry the raisins, which shouldn’t be too dry to begin with — buy the freshest raisins possible, big Mexican raisins. They should puff up and lighten in color, at which point they should be removed from the heat and dunked into a bowl of hot water to remove excess grease. Once all the raisins have been fried and the excess lard has been removed in the bowl of hot water, dump them into the large pot of hot water where the Chile Pasilla and Chile Mulato are soaking. Fry the almonds, peanuts and pecans until golden brown, and soak the nuts in hot water to remove excess grease. Fry the pinch of anis in one tablespoon of lard. Combine all the fried ingredients into a large bowl and add the cinnamon, clove, garlic, onion and tortillas, adding the sesame seeds last and stirring everything together in a chunky mix. Now it’s time to do something strange, but very important. Take the mole for a walk. Find the woman in the market stall or behind the tortilleria who has been grinding mole for 50 years, and you have to bring her the clay pot with the fried ingredients and the pot with the chiles still soaking in water, letting the fried and soaked and burned ingredients breath and get some sunlight, together and separately. The beautiful old woman in a flowery apron throws a few cups of water into the grinding machine, which is riddled with chunks of animal crackers and chiles from millions of moles past. The water in no way cleans the chunks away, but rather lubricates the stone wheels that have begun to spin with a heavy machine sound. So the taste of the pueblo, the city of Puebla, and its people also makes its way into the mole, which is a story more than a dish. The old lady adds the fried dry ingredients to the grinding wheel followed by the chiles soaked for 18 hours and the raisins with some of their water too. It all comes out in a greasy ochre-brown paste and the sound of stone on stone.

If you thought the mole was finished after it’s little trip, I’m sorry. We haven’t even added the chocolate yet! If you start early, you will have mole for dinner. And we haven’t forgotten our gallina vieja, which we bought at the market while the mole was ground at the molero. Begin by burning off any excess feathers directly on the charcoal, then cut the bird into four parts and fry the large chunks in manteca in a large clay pot (its easiest to use the same pot we used for frying). The lard should already be hot enough when the chicken is fried so that it cooks quickly, and so the skin becomes crispy and golden brown. Add the paste from the blended fried and wet ingredients to the pot with the bird and lard. Melt the chocolate in a small pot of hot water and add it to the clay pot with the ochre mix of chiles and the old chicken. Add the pepper and begin to add salt one pinch at a time, sprinkling in the shape of a cross out of respect to our ancestors, to taste. Slowly add already boiling hot water to the large clay pot until the entire mixture can be stirred with a wooden spoon, being mindful not to add too much water so that the mixture is too thin. Bring the mixture to a boil, adding more water if necessary and let it simmer on medium high heat for an hour. Once the pot has cooled, remove the pieces of the gallina vieja, being sure to not to leave any large chunks so that the mole is smooth and creamy. Cover the pot and let it rest, without being disturbed or stirred, far an entire day.

Finally, at least 12 hours later, while the sauce has set at room temperature throughout the day, bring the mole to boil again, adding about one half liter of water and continuing to stir and scrape the sides of the pot so that the precious mole doesn’t stick or burn. Add chocolate and salt or remove excess fat from the surface to taste. Serve generous spoonfuls of the warm sauce over turkey and let your tastebuds rock and your loins tremble, remembering the bi-curious nuns and their magical kitchen.

*****